Quotes About Multitasking

A woman's life has so many demands because she is the axis around which so many little planets spin.

My Great Grandmother Morrison fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. And one Saturday evening she became so absorbed in her book that when she looked up she found that it was half-past midnight and she had spun for half an hour on the Sabbath Day. Back then, that counted as a major sin.

Life is so infinitely hard. It involves a thousand tasks all at once. And I am a thousand different people, all fleeing away from the centre.

I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open.

So much of marriage is spent only half paying attention to each other. Talking while driving. Talking while watching Netflix. Talking while staring at a toddler, or scanning utility bills or catalogs from the mail or Evites for some distant weekend.

All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time.

I'm calling from my car, I'm sorry, I'm like running around like crazy.

Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.

It wasn't so long ago that I was a working mom myself. And I know that sometimes, much as we all hate to admit it, it's just easier to park the kids in front of the TV for a few hours, so we can pay the bills or do the laundry or just have some peace and quiet for a change.

I like to do weird things in the shower, like drink my coffee, brush my teeth and drink a smoothie. It's good time management.

Most of us can easily do two things at once; what's all but impossible is to do one thing at once.

A finger in every pie.

Thoughts have to follow each other, or they get jumbled. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness. We cannot run, sing, and balance the checkbook simultaneously, because each one of these activities exhausts most of our capacity for attention.

Emails we can read, say no to 'send a receipt', mark as unread, categorise, label and put in a folder whilst drinking tea and thinking about other things. It's hard work making the right noises and facial expressions in response to an in-person reminder.

But except in rare circumstances, you can train until you're blue in the face and you'd never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time." What we're doing when we multitask "is learning to be skillful at a superficial level." The Roman philosopher Seneca May have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere.

Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously.

Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere."51

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.

As we multitask online, he says, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove "deadly."54

Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no," says Grafman. "The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem." You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. BACK

Sam Anderson, "In Defense of Distraction," New York, May 25, 2009.

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That's not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It's also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages.

Intensive multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy," commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research.