Comments on: Multitasking Considered Harmful

By: WombatNation » Personal Productivity

WombatNation » Personal Productivity — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 08:12:45 +0000

[...] RobertEverything Else

Personal Productivity

As a nice accompaniment to my recent post about the dangers of multitasking,  someone recently posted an ex [...]

By: WombatNation » Life Hackers and Interruptions

WombatNation » Life Hackers and Interruptions — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 04:25:32 +0000

[...] like being attacked by a MIRV in the old video game Missile Command. This reminds me of a previous post on multitasking. After I posted about the Task Tracer project a [...]

By: michaelm

michaelm — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 06:18:00 +0000

I nearly made it, but was also visited by my daughter... can't consider her an interruption technically though, as it's a natural flow to read a little and interact with her, not to mention the fact that the word interruption impies (to me) a priority focus on the earlier task.

I liked the parts of the article that talk about "new reward centers" and "amazing ourselves to death" as I can easily relate to the reward-cycle of information gathering and the risks of overload.

For me, these are important things to keep in mind, especially as a teacher. Efficient teaching necessitates some degree of multi-tasking and constant decision making on multiple fronts, but technology isn't a part of my all-day-long reality, which I think makes it easier to sustain internet browsing after hours than it would be if I had a computer-based job.

By: Richard Berger

Richard Berger — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:22:56 +0000

So, here I was thinking – this is no challenge whatsoever. I can read this article without doing anything else. And I made it nearly all the way through until I was interrupted by the kids (it was time to get them off to school). At about that point, I realized that I had been eating breakfast while reading.

Although I think that I multitask often, I find that I have much longer stretches than 12 minutes during which I am working on a single task. However, I must admit that I generally stop doing what I am doing when email arrives – so much so that I will sometimes quit Outlook and leave it off for a few hours – it is just too addictive.