A Multi-tasking Society

One of my favorite magazines, Real Simple, published an article by A. J. Jacobs in its September issue (I'd link it but it isn't online yet since we're only halfway through August). The article is called "Stop the Madness: One Man's Quest to Go for Manic Multitasker to Zen Unitasker in One Month Flat." It's an essay that is part of his new book coming out next month.

I'm not writing to pitch his book; I'm writing to say that this essay really got me thinking--and do a Google search to see that his article has made a lot of other people think about multitasking as well.

I read this sentence and about fell over: "Unless I'm doing at least two things at once, I feel like I'm wasting my time." Wow, someone who has my same train of thought. Seriously, I can't watch a movie unless I'm doing something else. Is it bad to just sit down and enjoy a movie in my basement? Apparently it is. I usually am sitting at my iMac working on some sort of design or editing somebody's resume and I end up missing the entire movie. It's nice background noise though; my dad always turns on a movie when he's working on a project. In my house, we don't believe in stillness.

My entire family multitasks. The only one who doesn't is my baby sister, probably because she hasn't become fully engulfed in our crazy world. Well, let me take that back. She's great at multitasking if one of the projects relates to text messaging.

So yeah, I will go with my original statement: my entire family multitasks.

Some multitasking is okay to me, like having a conversation at dinner. A. J. does an experiment where he and his wife don't talk at dinner. Our entire culture is based around dinner + conversation. I can never give that one up.

I also can't give up the Internet. I now have an iPhone that lets me be connected all the time. It's probably unhealthy, but then again, everyone else with their Blackberry devices and Palm Pres are probably being unhealthy as well. All types of communication are everywhere, every day, and there's no way to get away from it unless we completely tune out. Which rarely happens.

Look what our society has become.

Even now as I'm typing this blog, I'm talking to a coworker, thinking about what to get for lunch--yes sometimes I am so busy doing multiple things that I forget to eat--listening to the printer make about 20 copies, and wondering why I've allowed my horrible morning to turn into an entire day. (I had a horrible morning. Don't ask.)

Someday I will teach myself to just sit without going crazy. But I don't think I can ever do it.