The Myth of Multitasking

When I was a cook I developed an odd ability to multitask the food I was cooking. Something inside of me would just go off and tell me it is time to do this or that. I could be throwing a bunch of veggies in a pan to broil and in the middle reach out with a spare hand and flip some salmon grilling, and then once I had the veggies in I would just know that the steak was ready to be served. My friend who worked with me had the same thing. I could even be in the storage room searching for something and know to yell to a cook to pull the shrimp out of the fryer because it was done.
The same does not work at my current job programming. Once someone takes me away from what I'm doing it takes a significant amount of time to get back where I was.

Not to get too nerdy, but multitasking or multi threading in real life is much like in a computer. Depending on what resource is constrained, you may find value or you may degrade performance, because multitasking adds some overhead. Cooking is a great example of a task that has external constraints not tied to the multi tasker's effort and attention. Things take time to cook, so while one item is cooking and the thread is idle, the cook can work on other food.

When I did desktop support, I'd multi task installs on 3 -5 computers at a time. Once the install is kicked off, it's wait time, with the occasional OK, yes, I agree…

In a PC, you become task bound if you spawn threads that are all processor intensive. Spawning threads only makes sense when they act on external resources, such as disk, network, etc.

If you are the only constraint, your time and action, then serializing your tasks is always the fastest and gets best results. Every study shows this. Time to complete and quality are enhanced by unhindered attention.

It's true; good cooks do multitask. I guess my comments are more oriented around the IT field.

All is good in the neighborhood as they say. I've been at T-Mobile for about 8 months and it's a good fit.

I actually get a lesson in multitasking each day. Most of my team is double and triple booked on con calls all day, and you can see how performance skyrockets when people get some quite time to focus.

I used to just work on one monitor. Then 2. Then 3. Then I was travelling for quite some time and only had my 12″ screen on my laptop. Guess what, I was just as production. Of course somethings weren't as easy – like when you are working on something, and like to have some reference material on the screen at the same time, but when it just came to getting work done, 1 screen was fine.

Now here I sit in front of 4 LCD screens, but only one of them is on most of the time.

Multiple screens push you to multtask I think. While you may be get little bits of multiple projects done, I believe your overall throughput goes down.