Driving with phones ... multi-tasking?
On my way to work, I was noticing damn near everyone was talking on the phone while driving. I even do it now and then, but it is not a good thing. If you must talk while driving please get a bluetooth or plug-in headset, at least you eliminate the physical distraction of holding/dropping/slobbering on the phone.
The interesting thing is it got me thinking about “multi-tasking”. You know, humans SUCK at multi-tasking. The term is really an illusion when applied to humans, because I don’t think we can do more than one non-trivial task with excellence. OK, you are probably going to say “walk and chew gum” or some other silly example. Those are things you can do without thinking about them, I am talking about things that require focus and/or thought. Can you juggle chainsaws while riding a motorcycle? Can you drive while playing a video game? Can you totally absorb a TV show while hammering out code? Sure it might be possible by a few (attributed to practice where it is more subconscious), but most people would suck at one or both of the activities. My point is that in general, we can only do one thing with excellence.
<geek alert siren pierces the air> Stop reading unless you have no objection to geeky content
Let me relate it to technology. Think of true multi-tasking like ethernet networking. With ethernet, packets are just flying around like mad and can (and do) collide with each other in the chaos. Many clients can truly have many requests in the ether at any given time.
Humans are more like token-ring networks. With token-ring, only the computer that has the token is free to blast out data, the others must wait for their turn. We are token-rings with multiple tasks awaiting our attention. The one we give our attention to has full access to our faculties, while the others must sit idle for their time. This (like token-ring networks) can be quite efficient, but it is not truly “multi-tasking”. Some things lend themselves well to this. Take cooking and doing laundry, you can switch back and forth between these two without much effort. Now take reading a technical manual and designing a web page, this is much harder because each time you switch you must “ramp up” back to where you left off.
So, the ability to multi-task is inversely proportional to the complexity of the tasks involved. I promised geek stuff didn’t I? Keep this in mind when you’re driving down the road and your phone rings … I’ll be the one honking and cursing when you inevitably slow down or swerve due to lack of concentration!
