gchpaco | (no subject)

I ran across this article in the Atlantic earlier today, and it has made me think somewhat about my own experiences with multitasking.

One of the things my advisor harps on incessantly is the alleged need for me to multitask; in this context it means ‘work on two academic papers at once’, which I am terrible at. Several of my friends have ADD, and I appear to have some inverted form of it; no one who has ever tried to IM me while I’m playing City of Heroes or while I’m hacking can seriously harbor the belief that I am paying them equal attention. This is sometimes called flow or hyperfocus, although hyperfocus appears to be considered a part of ADHD or ADD.

Flow is a good way of thinking about it, I find; I cannot enter flow when I am being continuously distracted, but once there it is quite robust. Much of programming involves keeping a lot of state around in my brain; it has been likened to juggling eggs, where a moment’s inattention and you get a mess. I tend to find that the best place for me to hack nowadays is in a secluded corner in the library, well away from any wireless connection so there is no chance for me to distract myself with web surfing. This happens a lot in City of Heroes, too; there are some characters that I literally cannot play if I am distracted or tired or otherwise unable to function at peak capacity that are incredibly effective when I am able to focus.

Oddly enough I do remember doing many things at once when talking to April those many years ago. I am not entirely sure what was going on there—probably web surfing or the like, which does not require focused attention.

I suppose this is a further manifestation of my unsuitability for modern life; even though I am a technologist I cannot handle the distractions it makes available. I am very reluctant to self diagnose with ADD or ADHD because I am extremely capable of focusing when I am in an environment where I can focus—say, outdoors doing woodwork, or photography, or hacking (when I can get moving on it). If I am ADHD then I maintain the term has no meaning.

Interestingly there is a class of window manager for Unix systems (the program that lays windows out; the fact that this is user replacable in X causes no end of confusion for Unix neophytes) called tiling window managers; examples include Ion or ratpoison. I’ve never found these to be exactly easy to use for day to day work, but the tiling aspect can make it very easy to focus on one thing by removing unnecessary extras without making it impossible to, for example, refer to a reference document in a web browser while writing an email or the like. Since I am almost entirely Mac based these days, I don’t run these very much, but perhaps I should play around with them some more to help my distraction issues.

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My stepfather is a bit of an organization freak, but one of the things that he said that really makes sense is the notion of a one touch doctrine. When you're trying to work your way through a pile of stuff, it's often efficient to minimize the number of times that you deal with each object. Ideally, you pick something up, finish with it, and then put it away.

It’s a good idea, that, and related to this issue of people thrashing due to excessive context switching. Unfortunately it works less well when the problem is juggling two or generally N large projects that you are expected to make progress on simultaneously; I’ve come to believe the problem there is really the expectation.

Very cool article. I do find that I am selective in my multitasking. I will watch a movie while handsewing or sifting through email, but reading a book, talking on the phone, writing an LJ post, coding in MatLab, doing homework, etc. are all activities that can be coupled with nothing more distracting than the classical music station. (Actually, not true, I can do math while listening to music with words, generally. But I can't write if there's someone singing in the background. I only have one word processing center, whether its auditory input or text output.)

I find that my multiple obligations are distractions to productivity. So I've been working to organize my obligations into something I feel like I fully understand and control, so I can let the ones I'm not working on go completely while I do what I'm doing.

(no subject)

The 'One Touch' Doctrine.

Re: The 'One Touch' Doctrine.

no subject