Singletasking

February 11th, 2010Blog0 comments

FRONTLINE: Digital Nation (watch it online here) takes multitasking to task, revealing studies that show that people who think they are effective at multitasking end up being fairly horrible at it. In fact when you multitask, your ability to memorize, make judgements, and focus are all degraded.

I’m working out ways to singletask and avoid the need to multitask in the first place. This is very difficult since my attention as always being diverted away to emails, iChat, my website, other peoples’ websites, Facebook, etc..

I think one thing that has worked well is to set small goals and reach them in increments, then take short breaks between. For instance, split reading a script into 25-30 page quarters or a book into 50 page sections. Then once I’ve accomplished a fairly large amount of work I force myself to play hard — i.e., reward myself with a fun activity so that my mind knows that it’ll get its Pavlovian fix once the work is accomplished.

This is tricky, but I’m hoping to keep at it until it becomes habitual.

The Wizard of Oz Was Kind of an Asshole: Yeah, I was thinking about this the other day.

He sends a young girl, her small dog, and her three harmless friends after the most powerful, evil force on the planet in what was was essentially a fraternity-style prank. “I want you to bring me the Wicked Witch of the West’s broom.” It would be like me telling someone to go steal Pablo Escobar’s Escalade.

So he gives a twelve year old a suicide mission in the hopes that she would never come back, merely because she was bothering him. Either that or he knew that she would eventually see through his disguise and thus wanted to get rid of her before she exposed him.

So he was willing to have her killed either because he was too busy or too insecure to actually help her.

And when Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals that he’s a bumbling charlatan who blew into town one day and is just as lost as Dorothy is, he immediately gives up the ghost and admits that he has no real powers whatsoever.

In fact, he doesn’t even APOLOGIZE to them. He doesn’t say, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry that I sent you into the lair of that horrible supernatural being where you were almost murdered.” No. Instead he says, “Oh no, my dear, I’m a very good man; I’m just a very bad Wizard.”

No you’re not. You’re not a good man. You’re a horrible man and even though you were only technically a figment of a girl’s feverish dream, you are the symbolic representation of humanity’s disappointment in the divine.

Boo on you, Wizard.