Slashdot Mirror
Multitasking Harmful To Productivity
Greyfox writes: "According to a CNN article, a person who is multitasking several things takes a hit on his productivity. Oddly enough, it reads almost exactly like a description of the problem with multitasking on computers; context switches cost, especially if you have to swap a lot of crap out in order to fit the new process into memory. So basically, an employee who can stay focussed on one thing for long periods of time is going to have higher productivity than one who has to handle constant interrupts. Now if I could get my manager to buy into that ..."
But, we have been aware of this forever. Unfortnanlly, companys will still try to make you do everything at once. So, in the end, you are less productive. No matter what, some managers don't have the brains to relize this ... Oh well.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
You pee twice as much while brushing your teeth? Better see a doctor about that.
Best Slashdot Co
Prejudice stops a thinking mind.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
"- Listening to my lovely wife complain, since I'm supposed to be on vacation "
Since this is #6 on the list, you obviously do not now how to be 'nice'.
-Shaunak.
Really experienced driver:
Hmm. I've noticed that between this light and the next light, the left hand lane travels slightly faster. If I can deek in, in front of that purple mercedes, I can switch to the left lane and gain at least three positions. I'll have to get over to the right pretty quick after that so that I can avoid the lane reduction coming up in three blocks....
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Research like this is needed because a lot of people are so dense, that they won't believe something unless it's written out for them in a report established by trained scientists.
Our populous' inability to observe, note, reflect, and comment on the thinking process is shameful.
If we're suffering from brain damage, we may say something like: people are simply being skeptical and scientifically minded. A little observation of society would rapidly reveal, however, that we do indeed possess brain damage if we came to such a conclusion.
People are not merely unobservant when it comes to analysis of their own minds; People do not want to know how they work.
My current hypothesis is that people identify their Souls with their minds, and thus inquiry into the mind is inquiry into the Soul, which is off-limits, much like sex, religion, and politics are off-limits.
Just some hairbrained theories of my own.
Just because MT is less efficient, doesn't necessarily mean it is bad. While a secretary getting interruptive phone calls is going to hurt her typing throughput, this loss is offset by:
- The appearance of responsiveness (person who called got to talk to
a human instead of voicemail)
- Max utilization (less idling)
Even if it means the secretary takes longer to do his work than a dedicated typist plus a dedicated phone answerer, you're only having to pay one person. Compare that to two people who would do their jobs faster but idle 50% of the time.Another way to look at it: Thanks to cooperative multitasking, MacOS 7.5 doesn't nearly so many of those "expensive" context switches that AmigaOS, MacOS X, Linux, etc have. But would you want to use it?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Just how tiring that is depends on the task, and the person. Different tasks require different levels of concentration and impose different costs for a context change.
If the programming task is intensely related to the tools and environment, then multiple tasks that are related along those lines do have a reduced cost. But not all programming tasks are like that. If the section of code being designed and written is highly algorithmic, you may have to forget all about tools for now and get that algorithm implemented correctly. And pray you don't get interrupted during that chunk of concentration.
The part about learning several languages makes sense. But there are differences in tasks and in people. We need to adapt and adopt to make the best match between people and tasks. The only company that should decline to hire single taskers is the one with no work that is suited to single taskers. Smaller companies do tend to have difficulties doing this due to so much going on and so few people to do it. Larger companies can easily afford to have people concentrate on intense tasks (and should choose those who do it well).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
But the tendency to use words and analogies drawn from current technology has a long history. Popular-science accounts of the working of the brain used to compare it with a telephone exchange. At the time they were written, this was the highest vaguely relevant technology. Fifty years later, comparisons were being made with computers.
The history of these analogies actually predates the age of information technology. Aristotle (284-322 B.C.), one of the greatest western philosophers, said that the purpose of the brain is to cool the blood.
And he deduced this by the way of pure thinking. He never read slashdot.
That article pretty much described my entire workday as it was up until I quit last month. I simply couldn't deal with the near-constant interruptions all day long.
There is a difference, however between self-imposed interruptions (such as checking Slashdot) and other-imposed interruptions (such as your boss asking you to go to his/her office for an unscheduled meeting). The other-imposed interruptions are far more damaging, particularly when they occur seemingly at random. I normally get pretty absorbed in whatever I'm doing, but when I'm aware that I could be interrupted by the phone or by a person at any moment, I find that I can't concentrate. Just knowing that I'm probably not going to be permitted to finish whatever I'm doing is enough to keep me from getting absorbed enough to be productive.
Not surprisingly, my home telephone's ringer is more or less permanently set to "OFF"...
Yqy...K ecp'v dgnkgxg aqw cevwcnna vqqm vjg vkog vq vtcpuncvg oa uki. Kh aqw vjkpm vjku ku tkfkewnqwu, tgcf oa dkq.
until CNN said it was so.
one better than mcleodeight
There was significant evidence a while back (and I can't link to it... grr where is it)... that women can listen to two conversations at a time because their brains are developed differently -- both hemispheres of the female brain respond to audio, but only one hemisphere of the male brain does.
This suggests that women would be great at multitasking and also an explanation of why they expect us to listen to them when we're busy.
Weevil
ghaa.
The left and right brain can operate independatly but people differ in their ability to move info between the sides. Women in general have better pathways between the sides and geeks typicaly have the worst. I've got my own ideas about geek girls but I'll keep them to my self for now...
I find that when I'm coding, even swaping out to say "hi" to someone in a hall can cause my brain to page fault.
While it isn't single tasking friendly, it sure is multi-tasking hostile (thou shalt only work on one song at a time, thy computer shalt forget all its settings every time you exit the program, etc.)
True. But how much time does it take you? 15 minutes, or more like 1 or 2 minutes? I'd guess for most kinds of tasks, and most interruptions, it'd more like a couple of minutes, rather than a quarter of an hour... Unless of course the interruption puts you off so much that you go into a Slashdot reading spree before getting back to work...
Wow.
I thought I had heard it all - but "time slicing" meaning you must "slice your time" so you keep jumping around? That guy must need a brain transplant.
I'm a web developer at a new media agency, and I've just recently moved away from doing client work into being responsible for our intranet.
There are many, many jobs going on in the studio at any given time, and obviously never enough people to cover it all. And clients being clients, they're prone to changing their mind very often.
The number of times a project manager would come up to me and say, "Can you just do [foo] for me?" is staggering. I think programmers have to maintain a reasonably high level of concentration to work, and when you get interrupted all the time that's just not possible.
The analogy's good: loading different things into memory, et al. That's exactly what it's like. I'd have to figure out which project they were talking about, remember where I'd put everything, how it worked, etc etc. Nightmare.
Now I've changed jobs and I'm in a department of my own, I can set my own targets, I can prioritise my work for myself, and I have no project manager standing over me. The increase in my productivity levels is incredible.
--
Karma: Chameleon (you come and go)
whereas real life multitasking is where i brushed my teeth this morning while peeing. twice the productivity, twice the results, same amount of time!
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
LOL, some poor guy spent months on this study, only to find out that somebody studied it 100 years ago. :)
Hmm, that's interesting. For me, I can't use a form of languages on two tracks simultaneously. I can't talk and listen, or talk and write, or listen and write, or read and listen, or read and talk (unless I'm reading aloud) at the same time. I can jump back and forth between two tracks with no problem, and a little bit of overlap is fine, but I can't maintain two tracks of language usage for more than a few seconds.
Doing tech support, this means I can't listen to a customer while taking notes - I have to wait for a pause in the conversation before I can take my notes (or put them on hold, or whatever). If I try to take notes, I can only get a few seconds before I can no longer hear the customer - needless to say, this is rather embarassing, so I try not to do it. Fortunately my boss was somewhat understanding, so I never got in serious trouble for having a low call volume.
I wonder if I have a milder version of what you describe? I've never talked to a doctor about it; this is all just from my own personal observation of myself.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Of course efficiency is lost in multitasking. But some things are "I/O bound", and wouldn't really benefit from intense concentration. One example is cooking. Do you stand there and watch the water come to a boil? Some men do. I've never seen a woman do that. There are other things that can be done while the water is boiling.
It comes down to what tasks have to completely STOP in order for another task to be worked on, and what tasks can still keep on working. You only need to be aware the water is boiling and can respond to it boiling over, to be able to multitask by giving the beans in another pot a quick stir, then going back to chopping the onions.
And this may explain why women are WORSE drivers. Driving on the road is a task that requires MORE concentration than it seems to. Men just inherintly do that more often than women (perhaps with some goals, like working their way to the front of the pack). Women will try to multitask more while driving (fixing their hair, putting on lipstick, chatting on the cell phone) and overcommit themselves as well (bringing the kids).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Hey, how old are you? vdu? I'm old enough to have used that acronym, but most people I know aren't ;-) Rock on, guy!
I'd have to say that interuptions do tend to cause lost time, as does constantly switching between projects (either finishing projects or only doing parts thereof), but changing projects can also raise productivity by getting somebody more interested in a project. I know that when I first start coding on a project I program a lot faster than a couple months into it.
terradot, growing awareness
...and I will attempt to prove it here.
[Hold on, the phone rang... I'll get right back to you...]
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Are you a smoker or something? The only people I see take a 15 minute break every hour are smokers. So you spend 2 hours out of every 8 hour workday on breaks? Must be nice.
well duh no shit.
Can i get paid to do research to show that people who stay to work overtime tend to work longer hours than those that don't?
Someone had to research this? I mean, everyone in my office seems pretty aware of this, even the upper management. That's the main reason that when someone really has something pressing we encourage them to work from home.
I have several "jobs" at my job. I'm a manager, I'm system architect, and I'm a developer. There are days, primarily on the development side, when I have to work from home. When you get distracted by questions and other issues, trying to figure out exactly what you were doing, and what your whole direction was, takes time. That's wasted time.
Oh well, just seems obvious to me. I'm suprised to see it as "news."
But thats just cause my dual monitor setup is still to small for all my applications to be open at once,maybe i should ask my boss for 2 21" screens so i can use a higher resolution then 1024x768 =P
And lets not forget more memory cause my computer is swapping the whole time which takes away my expensive time, which i could ofcourse better use for smoking sigarets and drinking coffee instead of staring at my computer screen.
However, most modern piloting tasks don't require deep thinking. Try doing all that, or even half of that, plus taking a star sight and working out your position with sliderule and nav tables... That's why large airplanes used to have a four man flight crew -- two to fly, one to watch the multiple engines, and one to navigate -- and small airplanes didn't use to have that many distractions. E.g., Lindbergh could center the controls and take a star sight without worrying about running into anything over the Atlantic ocean.
By Multitasking furiously I prevent my mind from getting bored. I am typing this now; on to a work related email next, then read a bit of a book about advertising copy and layout, then to this month's Linux Journal, and so on. Some of us work very effectively this way. More of us than you would imagine, I think/
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
I agree. I notice the same principle with the VI vs EMACS debate. VIm is just a text editor and a dam good one. EMACS tries to be the all things to all people and does a variety of tasks mediocrely well. I notice with Kmail, VIm, Konqueror all opened at once, I can be more productive then using just a one size fits all app via EMACS. Same is true for Microsoft Office.
http://saveie6.com/
my subconcious can do that and i've only been driving for a year
This is only true if the physical activities you mention don't require much concentration. I bet that someone who's just learned to ride a bike wouldn't find it so easy (-;
Hrm... I know I listen to mp3s a lot when I'm at home on my computer, but oddly enough, it seems to help my productivity. Maybe because I need some sort of 'background noise'. Or maybe I just work faster/better when listening to music.
Well, faster definitely.... better... I know I spend a lot of time debugging stuff that I shouldn't have had to, but that might be more based on the fact that I tend to code stuff/work on web pages on little sleep. But then, what is caffeine for?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
When you can sit and code for 12 hours, you are WAY more productive than if you work for 3, have to sit in a meeting for 1.5 hours, lunch with your manager, then more work, then another goddamn meeting. Eat while you code; im sure most of us do.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
...reminds me of the days of DesqView!
Seriously though, I am often amazed at the amount of stuff that people can juggle day in and day out. However, the cost of an individual's multitasking might not be a direct hit to productivity in an immediate fashion. If a heavily loaded indivdual loses the balance which allows them to efficiently task a number of projects, then that is where the productivity hit will make itself visible.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. This article doesn't tell us something we don't already know.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
I never get anything done while I'm reading the Slashdot news - my multitasking just won't work.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Ye, it also applies to us artists/programmers. I'm creating my own artwork and animation, and I am also creating the AI and other things for a game I am developing, and I get frustrated a whole lot and back away from working for a while, this gives people the impression that I am somehow lazy because I am not working on it. But reality of it is, that every time I start to think about the work during a switch, I get angry and frustrated, but after a while I can step right in and hammer things out, and biggest problem with that is they expect me to do it all the time, and then think I am lazy when I am not doing it. My biggest problem is before I get back into doing artwork or get back into doing programming I require a period of time to think about what I am doing, and to clear my mind about what I have done (because previous tasks lay not complete and are consuming large portions of my mind about how to complete them).
People run jobs through a plant in batch, because they worry about the costs of setup time (or switching costs). What most people forget is that the setup time is often irrelevant - unless that operation is the bottleneck. The gains in flexibility and reduced WIP outweigh the time spent setting up. See Goldratt and the Theory of Constraints for more info.
Regarding context switches...as a student in 1988 I read research on response time related to productivity that concluded system response times over 1 second caused the user to switch from task mode to "what's wrong with this ^#^%*#@ system mode" (or something perhaps more refined). The research likened the users focus to a stack of steps and any noticeable delay (interruption) would cause the stack to pop prematurely. Then the user would have to spend time and mental energy to rebuild the stack once the performance issue was overcome.
So, togther, this explains why when I'm working on a remote development server that starts dropping packets I switch to Slashdot and, with the new context stack, "forget" to switch back until interrupted by my boss walking in to ask about my progress on the three concurrent hot projects...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Multitasking seems to go back to the mantra beat into CIS/business students nowadays trying to convince them they are a new breed of "knowledge workers". This is a cute bizshit term for indentured servant or corporate bitch. If you're hired to be one of these poor folks you're expected to do the jobs of five people because the company wants to "streamline" their operations. Maybe this is because office suites package several programs in a single box managers get the impression you ought to be using every program in the box in order to be getting the company's money worth. Who can get work done when you've got to stop in the middle of everything to write up a response to a memo to attend a "team update session" or some shit. Too bad the only real opposition to this method was the dotcom-everyone-is-a-vice-president style of management which failed miserably. My tip is to look unfriendly when you start to work somewhere and tone down the personal hygiene a little and no one will want to bother you when you're in the middle of something.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Various sources, including Code Complete quote something like 15 minutes to get back into the flow of writing code.
And an average interruption frequency of ~1 minute.
I can, from my desk, while writing this, hear two conversations whose words are audible, several which aren't. One person giggling, and easily half a dozen phones have rung during the writing of this.
This would be a "development environment" then.
It hardly takes a scientist to notice that, after you have hung up, you actually spend some time thinking "now, what was it I was doing?" - and that it kills you even more when THAT process is interrupted again. Anyone who has been in the situation knows exactly what that does to you.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
Didn't Henry Ford relize this first.
Ha, fun to speak of humans in this manner :)
> I suffer from all the same symptoms
:-) ), and miss 80% of what I say. It infuriate me beyond I can tell ("Understand what I say, _then_ take notes"), because, of course he doesn't understand a few key points, then ask absolutely stupid questions.
I think we all do. But the thing I hate most, is when my partner (biz side) try to listen to me and take notes at the same time (He is absolutely sure that he is able to do it. In fact is absolutely sure that he can do anything. Did I mentionned he was american ?
Btw, I have a audio disorder too. I hear high and low pitched tones, but almost nothing (relatively) between those (which fortunately is the kind of noise people make with their mouth). The diagnostic was made when I was 28, and I had already inconsciensly developped an array of work around techniques (mostly by a poor-man reading-on-the-lips system, and by backtracking). Listening a discussion is sometimes extremely difficult. I need all my concentration when listening to the phone (another reason why I hate phones). I someone point-blank tell me something it will probably not be understood.
And like most the people I know, I am able to do several things at once, as long as you define 'do' as 'fuck beyond belief but pretend it works'. (That's not totally true. I can code with music. I can not design with music, or debug with music).
Cheers,
--fred
That's a great quote possible, and I felt I could comment a little bit more on what James said and make it a little easier to understand :)
There were many interesting studies done on people's multitasking by cognitive psychologists. Basically, the more you do/practice something, the more "automatic" it becomes to your brain/body. I.e. the more you practice guitar the easier it is to do it without thinking. This is because since you practiced guitar so much, your brain stored all of the movements and things you have to do to play guitar in your memory. So, when you play a song, you don't have to think about how to play it, your brain merely access all of the movements in your memory. Talking becomes sort of automatic also, so you can speak on the phone quite easily while doing other things. This is what the quote talks about as "automatic".
Here is a good paper that covers automaticity among other things if you're interested. I personally find cognitive psychology and science like this very interesting.
It is really interesting how right on James was, and only the language has really changed in describing what he knew on this.
Anyways since we only have one brain/cpu the article makes a lot of sense, also with keeping in mind how your multitask performance with some things is a lot better than others.
I was working out in Duluth, Ga...the Initials
of the Company , ironically enough, were I.E.
Anywho, the guy in charge of the area I was in
before I went to the QA dept said
"you need to learn to multitask"... I looked him
right in the eyes and in all seriousness asked
the eternal question "pre-emptive or co-operative?" the look I got was a total "huh/WTF" kind of look.
Strange thing is, I think that day I realize that a buzzword is something that the user of the word/phrase is usually clueless as to its meaning. Reminds me of my young son's forays into the four letter word catagories.
Had a 50/50 chance of getting it right.
Moose
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
The support phone is evil. How dare the user have direct access to the programming staff! These people should not be able to dictate what projects programmers should have to work on. The user is not my boss. But if I tell them to f*ck off, I'm catching shit from the boss.
Actually no
Taylorising is making the proces as efficient as possible by analising all the steps and finding out the most efficient way to perform each step. This will also give you more effieincy, but in the computerworld that should be compared to re-examining the keyboard and placing the most-used keys in placed where they can be accessed the easiest (for windows: placing CTRL-ALT-DEL in the middle). Taylorising will get you RSI, that's for sure.
Henry was the author, William the psychologist.
It may be more that the environment they're used to working in (news reporting) is so geared to interrupt/multitasking that they don't really think much about doing things any other way.
Re whether or not they'd read something like that: My guess is that while a few might read something like that on their own time (if they have any), on the job, it's not likely to get anything better than a quick scan, given the typical emphasis on speed of reporting (vs. depth of reporting)
Sounds to me like you're someone who thinks too highly of himself, who couldn't adapt to corporate industry, who hides behind his 'self-employment' as a way to keep from failing in the big time. Sounds like your wife works as your dodge.
Corporations like HP grew to their stature by hiring capable people. Those people take care of the task at hand and adapt to new ones. They don't sit at their desk and say, "I make widgets. You didn't bring me an order for a widget so I can't help you." Those who really rise to the top may not get a lot of coding done. They may have in their day, but mostly now they spend all day making fifteen other people better at their jobs. They are the controllers of the clues, those gems of corporate insight that allow everyone to make sense of their seemingly mindless tasks. Those people are the ones rushing from meeting to meeting.
For the record, I've worked in a government agency, a contractor for a government agency, a small shop, a large corporation. Now I'm a consultant, though not independent (I don't care to work that hard). As a consultant you walk in and are expected to show results from day one. The person who can make or break your project is often that keeper of clues. Find that person (the real one, not the pretender) and you can save yourself a lot of time and headache.
- Sig this!
It's as if I translate the words into whatever chunks I use for my mental processes, and then translate these back into words when I speak. Probably most people do the same, but I think that whatever I use for my chunks is probably a bit further from words than most people, and that from any of my chunks there is no clear way back to any specific word, hence the same meaning/different word type thing.
This is supported by my poor performance at things that require some verbal skills: I can write well, have a large vocabulary, but am often stumped by some of the word puzzles you get in IQ tests and the like. Things like "what word has the letter sequence 'WKW' in it?" and the like. I just don't think like that.
On the other hand the sort of puzzles you get where "next shape in the sequence" I find trivially easy.
Oh - and the word is "awkward".
You're normal. No one (well, _very_ few) can listen well and do other language processing simultaneously.
I'm worse than most of my peers. Most of them don't have much trouble typing notes while listening to a customer on the phone, and I can't do it. I can type a few words here and there, but cannot type anything coherent. Of course, some of them compensate by leaving incoherent notes (which is very annoying when the customer calls back), and others compensate by copying and pasting pre-written notes (which don't necessarily match the call at all), but it seemed to me that I had more of a problem than most people. *shrug*
It's definitely time to get into system administration.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
it has to do with the way there psyche is set up to nurture a child while doing other things . . . apparently women use both hemisphere's more efficiently while men have a neutralized left hemisphere allowing for decreased sensitivity ( and hence bravery :-) ) and also gearing them towards more linear thought.
:-)
You can find studies that point in all directions on this, but do some of your own observational research on this and see what you come up with.
I've come to think of women and men as different yet complimentary rather than ==
Listen to Reality!
It's good to know I'm not the only one who does that - after all, neither one takes much concentration, and you can do each with one hand!
Female Prison Rape in NY
Four radios, talking to six people, a co-pilot, maps, weapons systems, mast mounted sight, scanning for other aircraft, while on a screenline looking for bad guys, setting up relief on station and tracking the movements of everybody.
Multi-tasking? What's that?
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
You got that right. I've got 18 freakin' browser windows open right now, forget about all the other stuff that's open, too. I'm impatient, and some of us can actually handle multitasking, thank you. Sure, there are some times when it slows me down, like I won't read a book while listening to something like the Phil Hendrie Show because that my brain doesn't handle very well. Then again, knowing the simps that work at CNN, it wouldn't suprise me in the least if they have one browser window open at a time, spending 50% of their time just watching that little blue ball spin 'round and 'round...
There is a nice article on Joel called Human Task Switches Considered Harmful explaining how context switching is extremely damaging for programmer's productivity. He of course does not have any statistical data to back it up with, but it is a convincing read if you have worked on more than one programming task at a time for whatever reason. Most managers who have not done programming themselves unfortunately do not understand this.
If I remember correctly this was the whole idea behind the assembly line.
But of course, it was also quickly found out that humans make too many errors and can't concentrate if the task is too simple. The law goes both ways - you're under stress if what you do is too difficult, just as you're under stress when the task is too easy.
So, is this really news? Wasn't there this old saying going "too many cooks spoil the broth"? Doesn't that already say everything?
-- sigs are like parking spaces - all the good ones are occupied
there is software system costs and hardware system costs associated with context switches. lots of things represent "context" switches ... in addition to multitasking .... address space changes, applicationkernel transitions, protection domain changes, numerous kinds of asyncronous interrupts, etc.
the introduction of multitasking representing additional significant "context change" overhead in a particular system may depend, in part upon whether or not the system already experiences significant context change overhead because of other reasons.
random other refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshar e
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock
Test
Conversely, if a woman wants to talk to her boyfriend, she doesn't see it as problem to talk to him while he's watching the football, she can quite easily pay attention to both. To the man as soon as he focuses one one the other loses focus, so if he hears the crowd roar he's probably going to miss your next sentence completely while his focus flips to the TV.
This has nothing to do with multitasking. It has everything to do with any football game being infinitely more interesting that anything some woman might be yapping about.
- ROT13 ENCRYPTED: Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, lbh unir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN
Well, if you tell me how it's encrypted, I don't really think you're protecting it.http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$ 300
I agree. If I'm programming by myself, I might interrupt myself to check my e-mail; if I'm programming with someone else, no way.
In addition, a pair of programmers working busily together look busy. If I'm at my computer, either typing furiously or staring at the ceiling (deep in design or debugging thoughts), I look interruptable.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Trying to think of something profound, while going for First Post.
That'd be real-time multitasking.
Sky indeed blue, research study concludes.
Copyright 2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
There some very good parallels between brain work and computing in the 60's. A good CPU would often overrun the IO devices, and since the CPU cost half a million they didn't like wait cycles. So when it had to wait for IO, it would switch to another task, until that had to wait also, etc. The analogy is to you working on one job until you find that you need information from someone else to proceed, writing e-mail to him, then switch to another job until the reply comes back. This (task switching when on hold) improves productivity. On the other hand, when you get a phone call about some project you aren't even working on today, or have to stop coding to go to a meeting about parking spaces, you lose productivity. Likewise, interrupt-driven task switching tends to reduce the number of jobs finished per hour, and only became common when the CPU's became fast and cheap enough that you could afford to waste cycles.
Since the human brain isn't getting any faster, any situation where you are frequently interrupted is going to reduce the amount or quality of work completed. Note also that there are major and minor context switches, and the cost difference is much larger than the difference between switching processes and threads. Switching to a different part of the same project requires re-loading "registers" (short term memory), but the major context of the project stays the same. Switching to something I put away last week will probably require skimming through some of the documents to remember where I left off and to refresh my memory of the overall structure.
I'm talking about a quantitative analysis. That's the first step to a deeper understanding of the nature of the brain's higher level functions.
... it's common knowledge that you can throw your brother up in the air and he'll fall back down, but explaining *exactly* where he'll go takes quite a bit more than common knowledge (we call it "physics.")
In other words
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
That can be hard to get across with an IM.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
This is known since Taylor :
:
a worker that is specialized in a single movement is more productive than another doing different things.
But this is only true in a short term view
The fact that workers feel less considered will bring less productivity and a bad feeling about the company.
Funny, I got so much more done back in the days when I used a command line than with this BSOD showing up all the time.
/. itself. How many times a day do you check for new articles and post comments? I have no doubt that it helps as well, providing links to patches or warnings about the latest l337 h4xx0r virii, but it has to cause a hit to productivity at some point. (Unless you're a marketing weenie, of course, they're not productive to begin with.)
IMAO, one of the biggest hits to productivity is
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
IMVVVVVHO this is denying the abilities of the human mind to do several things at once. Here I am typoing thos message whilst simultateously picking my nose and wondering what is for breakfast. Easy
Get the EULA T-shirt
Sky is colorless, but appears blue due to absorption or refraction or whatever it was called.
I'm not so sure this is all true. Of course it is an experiment and nothing is stated as fact. But I believe that everyone has a certain ability of true multitasking and not losing any production at the same time. Sure an interruption may delay something simply because of the time it takes, but loss in productivity is not always there. When it is, it's simply there as part of a learning curve. If we humans couldn't multitask, then we'd all be dead. I don't recall forgetting to breath or losing heart beats from replying to an icq message. They say the avg person can't multitask productively, but they also say the human doesn't use more than 10% of the brain. Studies have also shown that the brain can become efficient at multitasking but there is a learning curve. So yeh, if your not used to, interuptions could disrupt things and reduce productivity, but after being used to it (the brain becomes more efficient) and viola, it's not so much a problem anymore. It's like when you are having a conversation and someone interrupts you...you forget what you were saying and say 'what was I saying again', totally oblivious to what you were saying. Then the person says the last 2 or 3 words you were saying and poof you remember and go on. Well, if instead you wrote down the last 3 words before the interruption and look at them, you'd remember and go on. Eventually, if your interrupted a lot you learn how to keep track of what your saying and not have to ask the other person. You ask yourself and remember and go on. Then you subconsciously learn how to perform the 'remembering' task and it doesn't reduce your ability to have a conversation if someone interrupts you. Same goes with coding, reading, running, or anything else. Anybody can do math, read or run (well...literate people). But it's hard to do all three. But on the other hand, some read or run or do math faster than others simply because they can concentrate better whether there are interruptions or not. So, to judge the brains ability to multitask by such simple experimentation I believe, has no degree of accuracy. It does show points of adding tasks to an individuals current work load. The real question is, is the decrease in productivity for the person to learn how to manage the added task worth the productivity that will be produced once the individual has experience with the added task? This does of course involve the risk of reaching a persons limitations, but if those limitations are reached, I would imagine a pay raise could change the limitations, the person will quit, the person will complain, or the person will be replaced with someone with better 'limitations'. This article as someone said is pretty much stating the obvious, but I think it's also leaving out some real good details at the same time. BTW, someone said something about ridalin. I'm not sure that stuff is worth the money to buy it. I have adhd (oh yeh, i'm another victim and have a 'deficit' - o poor me!), but i've never needed medication to concentrate. I just had to learn how to concentrate just like all the other people in the world. Don't take offense, but if you work hard enough you don't need a drug. The brain is to complex, to resorting to taking medication. Of course if it helps it helps, and i'm not knockin it too much, but you can learn how to concentrate without it. ______
I have an office of 30 people on an NT domain with win2k laptops for everyone. I have a data center with about 12 servers running oracle, sql7, exchange, iis, etc. I have a 4 tier QA network in-house running WebLogic, Resin, Oracle and AFS. I also have a 6 machine production environment at Dellhost running Apache, JServ and SQL7. On top of that, I have a 4 tier, 9 machine production environment running at exodus with Weblogic, Resin, Oracle and AFS.
I manage all of this by myself, including all of the myriad problems from the 30 users (my mouse isn't working.... can I get a set of speakers? i need new antivirus software....), tech support for 3 versions of a software product that we don't sell anymore but still have to support, and I have to manage finding a new hosting partner and planning for future architecture of our ASP product.
I can multitask 'til my head falls off, but productivity only happens when you're allowed to actually focus on one thing for at least 2 hours. Getting your brain into and out of each mindset can take up to 15 minutes to half an hour. It's not easy, it's not fun, and overall it can lead to far too much stress from not being able to complete things on time or as completely as you'd like to.
Oh yeah, throw 4 or 5 mandatory meetings per week into that mix, and you've got my life. Yay.
- your boss
I don't think this is at all uncommon. Although sometimes I listen to very strange stuff when I'm hard at work - anything from the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever to extreme hardcore music like Zao.
:)
I find sometimes that if I don't have any music or if I can't seem to find the right kind of music, I can get really irritable when I'm working, and lose focus - this usually only happens when I need to get stuff done quickly.
And during the same time, 5 probes of Code Red have hit the Web server, and 11 probes of Code Red II. If at least Joe hadn't put in that silly beeper into default.ida.cgi which goes off on every probe... How can anybody work in such an environment?
The main reason employers would be against home working has to be lack of supervision. But I would be willing to allow my boss to supervise my every keystroke via some sort of remote login to my machine if necessary. Back on topic, I think the idea of avoiding multitasking has always been in the back of most programmers minds in that it is common practice to batch, for example, copy and pastes that are similar rather then in doing them in the order that the code appears.
IMO forced multitasking is a result of the poor organizational and management skills of your boss.
Also, I'm willing to wager that people work much differently now than they did 100 years ago.
Just wait until they toss 50 hours of high priority work at you every week, then ask why the lower priority work is all overdue...
A company I worked for called itself a 'matrixed organization', which is a term I had never run into before. All of the job postings mentioned the term (as in "The successful applicant must work well in a matrixed work environment") but the term itself was never defined. I assumed that the term was some MBA jargon, but was never able to find a precise definition in a reliable source.
As far as I could tell, the term covered both 'multitasking' for the individual employee (technical folk often worked on several projects simultaneously), as well as some amount of ambiguity as to the precise chain of command in the organization (the employee was responsible to several managers, but if you didn't appease the right manager, you got your head bitten off, or worse). To top it off, there was damn little guidance from management as to task priorities, until a task was severely behind schedule, at which point you got lots of 'guidance' (in the form of pestering and reprimands).
Anyone who has suffered through this kind of work environment knows that 'multitasking', in manager-speak, is just another word for 'work harder you miserable peons', often with a healthy dose of 'make sure these tasks get done in the right order, even though I don't know what that order is.'
</GRIPE>
I was leading my mom to restaurant the other day, after leaving a guitar store. I bought a new guitar, and I was driving in 5:00 traffic (in a big city), playing my new guitar with the window rolled down, smoking a cigarette, and talking to my mom on the cell phone (NOT with a hands-free headset either). I arrived safely.
Actually, the researchers have a fairly complex view of multi-tasking, that doesn't happen to include all the concepts you'd like to read an article about. It applies more to switching on a smaller time scale. Very little of their view is reflected in the CNN article -- actually, almost everything in the article could have rested on some research from about 25years ago and from 80 years ago.
It's worth noting that it didn't take eight years of constant work to conduct this research. It took eight years to get it published, probably because some of the people who do research in this area are territorial and can make it difficult to get good work published. In the meantime, all of these authors did many, many other things, including finding a new career for one of them.
I tend to disagree with the findings, as it depends on what particular tasks you are multitasking. I for one, feel a benefit to multi-tasking, because I have processes that require me to wait. It's far better to be doing other work while waiting for a command line to return.
Plus, I have a tendency to multi-task and switch in pretty well. I've been noticing lately that when multi-tasking, I've been switching out mid-sentence, doing some other work, then coming back and completing a sentence. Weird.
Fortunatly I don't suffer from the same disorder... actually I think it's normal, that's why all the dumb teachers want you to "pay attention" when you already are. (Not to mention taking notes!)
That PC company chick probably cannot single task very well. That is, she cannot concentrate on one single task and get the job done as quickly as possible. She probably isn't putting her mind into the work she is doing. What was her job? A programmer? I doubt it.
Multitasking abilities not only depend on who the person is (it varies from person to person) but also what the work is. Some work lends itself well to multitasking in more people, and other work does not.
Answering the phone is NOT a mentally challenging task. Your mind does not need to concentrate on it. Have you ever started daydreaming while talking to someone boring on the phone (and if it isn't another geek talking geek stuff, it probably is boring for us geeks)? That's a sure sign you have CPU cycles leftover during the task. You're I/O bound.
For some people there isn't enough CPU speed available to do the daydreaming (I'm not saying these people are dumb). These are the people that multitask well. And the reason they are able to do so is because the work they end up doing is the kind of work that fits them, and does multitask well. Keeping files organized, typing notes into a report, answering phone calls, etc, do require one to think about what they are doing, and better people do them better. But these tasks are NOT the intense concentration type of task.
If I were hiring programmers, the people that say NO to the "can you multitask well" question are the people I would want to hire because they are the ones that can concentrate on the job and get it done sooner. They are the ones with the larger cache upstairs, which is needed for complex programming.
The ones that say YES to multitasking are still useful and can still be as smart. But the tasks they are best suited to are different, like testing, tech support, sales, etc (depending on their interests).
And there are people that fall into every level in between, as well as tasks.
Beware, however, that there are some managers that expect multitasking to actually not slow down other work. I've had a manager give me a programming task on Monday asking me how when I could get it done. I said Thursday or Friday at the latest. We agreed the commitment was Friday (how nice of him). On Tuesday he had another task that was more urgent. But it could get done by Thursday for sure (it was a smaller task). But then when I mentioned that the first task would now be delayed to next Tuesday, that manager said "but we agreed it would be done on Friday". I had to respond "No, I agreed that I would have it done in 4 days and that works out to Friday if I have every day this week to work on it, which I no longer have". His next response was "Well, I already committed to (name of other team that needed first task) that it would be delivered Friday". I sure wanted to say something like "Have you lined these 2 tasks up on your copy of Microsoft Project, yet?" (actually the real reason I wanted to say that was because he refused to buy Microsoft Project for anyone in the department, including himself). In the end I had him convinced that programming tasks could only be done one at a time. But he completely forget that concept just a few days later.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams
by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
Lotsa good don't-do-this stories about pointy-haired bosses.
...and then your manager tells you "whenever I come to your office for a quick & innocent question I see a Slashdot window on your screen. That certainly doesn't help with meeting the deadlines..."
He only told you the name of the encryption algorith, not how it's encrypted or how to decrypt it.
That's not exactly it. The idea is to collect lots of tiny single-purpose tasks (from your users most likely,) shuffle them all together, rip through them ("fancy frameworks" are looked down upon,) practice QA by having your friend Bubba watch what you're doing over your shoulder, and don't be afraid to rework the code (also -- don't program anything that's not on any of the single-purpose task cards.) Once you've run through one iteration of this, go back to step one and start over.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
You're normal. No one (well, _very_ few) can listen well and do other language processing simultaneously. Listening well is a critical skill that mostly requires paying close attention. Many people use that time, not really listening, but thinking about what they're going to say next, or worse, interrupting the person speaking before they finish their thoughts (this is inexcusable, but all too common).
But hell, I can't read fine manual print and see a projector screen at the same time - I need two different pairs of glasses, and have to switch back and forth. (I also hate fuzzy PDFs onscreen, so boycotting Adobe 'til Dimitry's actually released is just fine with me!)
it was probably news to him
Not to mention that many of the things I do _require_ me to use several tools more or less in parallel. I.e. I need an editor to do my coding, a few command lines to handle compiling and debugging, a browser or other tool to view the result of my coding, documentation tools and sources, IRC (for informational purposes ;), etc. etc. etc.
;)
Although not all of these processes are actually _doing_ anything all the time, they are several applications that I need to have running and ready-to-serve at any given moment of the day. So even though _I_ may be working on only one task as such, the computer is working on several. And without this capability of my operating system of choice, I wouldn't be able to do my job half as effectively.
Bottom line is - My computer is a tool. As long as I am using only one computer at a time, and only working on one project at a time, I'm single-tasking. My computer is multi-tasking, but the term 'task' has a entirely different meaning.
And no OS does multitasking like OS/2
Love over Gold.
Because he didn't require our immediate attention, the stuff in short term memory wasn't lost. We could get it written down before any new input erased it from our minds. It also gave us a chance to 'bookmark' our thoughts, with a mental reminder before the switch. The result was less time wasted getting back to where we were before the interruption, better focus on the new task, and less stress associated with 'switching gears'.
Of course this method requires two things that are regretably rare in corporations: a manager with the humility to recognize that sometimes a programmers time is more valuable than his/her own, and upper management who are able to distinguish between the appearance of productivity and actual production. (I'm sure that in a lot of companies he would have been faulted for wasting a lot of time 'just standing around'.)
Touche. Also, people, like computers, have different specs. Some of us are running 1.5 GHz RISC technology with *nix ontop, others have got little 486-33 Wintel systems in their braincases... the former have little difficulty in switching from different languages/editors/shells...
hmm.... so what's the "people" equivalent of the old AmigaOS trick of speeding up multitasking context switches by not bothering to enforce process memory space boundaries?
Is it the classic "untidy desk" approach, where _you_ know where everything is, even if it appears all jumbled together, and just so long as noone else moves things around by "helpful tidying", which causes a massive stall (reboot in the amiga case) you can blaze through multiple tasks?
We all multi-task all the time. Think what it would be like if we only allowed switching once a year... Jan-Mar asleep, first week of Apr in the bathroom, communte for the rest of apr, eat through May, June to Sep solid work, then Oct to Dec for R&R, ending with several days of solid sex. Its just a matter of timescales - too little and too much are both wrong. People vary, tasks vary. If you're being overloaded, multi-tasking or some other way, give your managers feedback. If your managers cant take feedback and act on it, get better managers.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
So, you're thinking about 4 tasks from work (not doing them, just thinking about them), working on coding PHP, and most of the rest of your time is occupied by Code Red?!? That's pretty sad. Code Red is NOT that interesting. Go spend some time with your wife, or work on your PHP project. Forget Code Red for awhile. If your IIS machines are patched and everything else runs Apache, you should be fine.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
That basic concept also applies to driving a car. With new drivers, many of the basic decisions are handled consciously - and there are a lot of them. As you gain experience, your subconscious can take over a lot of the work, so you no longer have to concentrate on so many different things.
New driver:
OK, the light in front of us is turning red, so we have to stop. We need to shift into first, so first we step on the clutch, shift, release the clutch. Now we also need to step on the brake, slowly, paying close attention to where the car in front of us is so we get reasonably close without hitting it. OK, there, we're stopped, I can relax now.
Experienced driver:
Damn, I knew we should have taken the freeway.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
(All right, all right, technically you haven't violated it, but the people who wrote and distributed the program that let you read it--for instance, Sklyarov's e-book reading program that decrypts ROT-13'd e-books--did. But my line is shorter and makes the point better.)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I am so good at multitasking that I can cook, do my hair, read /., K5, rootprompt, wideopen and three mailing lists at once, but never managed to code, because some clueless programmers told me I should RTFM online and the relevant mailing lists.
Big mistake. Never tell that a woman. We art just too good at reading all that's irrelevant simultaneously with that what isn't and then seem always let the wrong processes run in the background.
I am all for it, send the men home and let them do the three CCC, coding, cooking and chatting. Send me in the office an let me do the three SSSs, smiling, screaming and surfing. Meanwhile we think about the three PPPs, planning, purchasing and procrastinating and end up with three BBBs, burned out, bored and bancrupt.
Good job.
I agree, I can hardly stand to even have somebody else in the room while I'm programming. I do think that peer review is helpful (I frequently dump out source blocks that I think are interesting and discuss them with my coworkers,) but not *real-time* peer review. ;)
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
There's a running joe that James' century old work represents basically everything cognitive scientists know today. In other words, not much new progress in the last 100 years. :) Anyways, to quote from James' book, chapter 11 (emphasis mine):
[p. 409] If, then, by the original question, how many ideas or things can we attend to at once, be meant how many entirely disconnected systems or processes of conception can go on simultaneously, the answer is, not easily more than one, unless the processes are very habitual; but then two, or even three, without very much oscillation of the attention. Where, however, the processes are less automatic, as in the story of Julius Caesar dictating four letters whilst he writes a fifth,[9] there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind from one to the next, and no consequent gain of time. Within any one of the systems the parts may be numberless, but we attend to them collectively when we conceive the whole which they form.
When the things to be attended to are small sensations, and when the effort is to be exact in noting them, it is found that attention to one interferes a good deal with the perception of the other. A good deal of fine work has been done in this field, of which I must give some account.
It has long been noticed, when expectant attention is concentrated upon one of two sensations, that the other one is apt to be displaced from consciousness for a moment and to appear subsequent; although in reality the two may have been contemporaneous events...
Chad Loder
Rapid 7, Inc.
The next generation of network security products
I tend to disagree... many studies have shown that the early years of development are crucial to brain development and that this is when the brain 'wires' itself based on stimulus received.
People with the above, such as CAPD, "usually have a history of childhood illnesses, such as allergies, food intolerance, colic, tonsillitis, asthma, sinusitis or ear infections, that resulted in ear blockages so that they experienced difficulty in hearing during their first years of development.. Since these children have faint and distorted sound input, they use their eyes as a means of compensation and develop high visual spatial abilities. While their hearing is not permanently affected by these blockages, the development of auditory information processing is impaired..." (quote from: I Think in Pictures, You Teach in Words)
well its easier to context-switch between similar tasks (coding, or cooking, or whatever) than it is to switch from coding TO cooking :P
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
He means "eXtreme Programming" (See this link.) It's the latest process trend (that is ... it's trendy --- like, sooo retro.)
Has anyone had any good experiences with ISO 9001?
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
Well some jobs have the interruptions as the primary function (ie receptionist).
The fact that they get anything done during the waiting time means a gain of productivity beyond their primary function.
Sure if we just did one thing at a time without interruption we would get more done. But unless you deal with those "interruptions" and other stuff that constitutes your job, you're going to be a pretty useless employee.
In other words, many a manager is afflicted with a typical political/bureaucratic disease, which I usually label "Prioritizing PR over actual effectiveness". Appearances become more important than actually getting things done. Unfortunately, those afflicted with this may well get to the point where they don't understand why reality doesn't live up to the PR they've been pushing so hard.
Could you please solve the Traveling Salesman problem with an algorithm that works in linear time (linear in relation to the number of cities?)
He's just been sitting there waiting for somebody to solve this problem and I'm sure that with your COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, Java and Python experience, this kind of thing will be no problem. You even said you'd "been round the block quite a lot" so all you've got to do is let the guy follow you (just make sure that you pick the right blocks.)
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
People are bad at talking about internal mental experiences, and are embarrassed to.
Do not delude yourselves into believing that people have radically different brains; That is a postmodern perspective with no attachment to fact.
Dismiss with the notion that everyone is unique in their own special way (a romanticism based in pomo), and realize that some are simply better at observing certain things than others.
The observation that if you are lost in thought, that you cannot hear others, is unique to you only in that you are noticing it. But everybody is like that.
It infuriates me that people perpetrate the pomo myths in the name of diplomacy, which allows no establishment of foundations or statements, particularly in the realm of mental operation, which is something of a sacred cow to humans.
Observe and Listen.
I suspect that, except for the staff geniuses and the people focused on make-or-break tasks, the answer is often that the productivity costs of multitasking is offset by its benefits.
you get told in the corporate world to multi-task all the time... it's the quality of a senior engineer... since it's a good quality you won't mind if I talk on my cell phone while driving? will you? I mean good senior people know how to multi-task, and my last review says right here that I am one...so now what was that number, I need to have a good arguement with...
I would agree with that and furthemore believe Microsoft is one of the most expensive hits to productivity there is. Vulnerability here, exploit there, patch here, reboot there...
That an interesting point... I know of one study where they played two conversations back at the same time. It was found that in general women were better able to give a general idea of what each conversation was about while men could give a detailed explaination of one and next to nothing on the other.
To a man (ie. me) turning down the radio doesn't make sense because if I need to focus on looking for a street sign I don't need to ignore the radio, its just naturally tuned out. To a woman turning down the radio makes sense because she's paying attention to both and doesn't naturally ignore one over the other, so to concentrate more she needs one input (the radio) removed.
Conversely, if a woman wants to talk to her boyfriend, she doesn't see it as problem to talk to him while he's watching the football, she can quite easily pay attention to both. To the man as soon as he focuses one one the other loses focus, so if he hears the crowd roar he's probably going to miss your next sentence completely while his focus flips to the TV.
So basically women, in general, are better multi-taskers while men are better at focusing on one task at a time.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages and neither are really limiting just require different environments.
all this research is made under the umbrella that we process things serially, much like a really really fast serial processor... ( ok not-so-fast for some of us ) but really the human brain is a parallel processor.
:)
that's why we can recognize faces from all sorts of angles. that's why walk and chew gum altogether without stumbling.
this certainly carries over to higher cognitive processes - when we multitask, we dont 'swap out' previous task info - we really do start thinking of two things at once.
that's not to say that if we start doing fourteen things at once that we wont BSOD
just a thought.
"Peopleware" by Demarco & Lister talks about the concept of "flow" and the E-Factor (I think that's what they called it). These concepts are related to the amount of uninterrupted time you have available to complete a task.
a sp ?theisbn=0932633439&vm=
ObBookURL:
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.
Some thoughts from my workplace
I find myself more and more multitasking (and now its not just because i have to use win2k at work - but that adds to it) the fact is that we are caught by a couple of things
1. Expectations of Users - The average user has come to expect support and help in a much quciker time frame which couples with their increasing knowledge and skills (note this in general) to produce a class of user who thinks every problem is major and they then try to fix it them selves therefore ensuring it IS a major problem.
2. complexity of systems - this goes hand in handwith the above - eveyr day systems grow more and more complex - we are in the process of SAP implementation and this is a killer on the back on WIN2k, Intranet Payroll and HR and Intranet helpdesk loggin - the number of passwords grow and there is no easy way to resolve the issue and maintain security - that means the system become more complex on a daily basis and the struggle for support staff and users to keep up with the required skills and knowledge (paid training is an impossible joke in most companies - it does not happen)
3. Time and Resources - time is a valuable concept - the amount of time in a day is finite at 24 hours and you can only work so much of it - yet i spend a lot of my time waiting for things to load and dealing with FIX THIS NOW requests for low priority issues whilst trying to fix the major issues i have - it takes longer to tell them to go away than the fix would but you have to maintain a focus. Staffing resources have also decreased - in my role its down to 1 staff member for every 100 staff and sometimes less - i have a state to run with approx 200 users and there is me and one part time partly skilled staff member who gets sick 2 days a week, so you can imagine that i dont have time to relax - 18 hour days are standard and i have done more than one 20 hour.
4. Money - the pressure of technology means that companies have to stay on top of things to survive - that means upgrades, new systems, software etc. This comes at a huge cost - SAP cost us AU$20 Million and thats only year 1 - dont forget as IT we now have to look after Phones, Video Conferencing, TV's, Boardrooms, Photocopiers, Fax Machine, Building Management Systems, Security Systems, etc etc - all this with less staff than before (2 years ago to do less i had 3 staff full time working flat out) - no money = no staff (SAP again)
SO whats the multitasking point ?
Yes staff who multitask are probably less efficient but then again hiring adequate staff to fill the roles in an organisation would mean less multi tasking and more efficiency - simple maths really.
I multitask because i have to - the headaches, backachec, half done jobs and 10000 email messages i cold do without - im efficient as hell tho - i have to be to survive and stay sane.
No if you will excuse me the 5 minutes i took to write this whilst waiting for a server to reboot is up and i have to go fix SQL - god i wish i had another pair of hands as well...
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
I cant imagine anything more annoying than working THAT closely with another person - although I might use this as an excuse to get out of work by standing behind coworkers helpfully saying things like "hey Rob, you just missed out a ';' at the end of that line" until they get mad and shout at me ;)
Oracle only! http://members.tripod.co.uk/pjmoss/sql/pjm_sig.sql
You're talking about tech support here? Have you ever stopped and considered that maybe the fact that you or your peers can't take coherent notes is because the customers are bumbling twits? I've been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The average Joe calling an ISP tech support line sounds like he couldn't manage to tie his own shoe much less use a computer and the Internet. Notes? Who has time to write notes when you're spending most of your processing time trying to decypher what the hell the guy's talking about. :-) "So you want to get online... you don't have a modem? You'll need to get one. No really, yes.. you need a modem to dial up to our service. No I'm not kidding. Any electronics store should carry them. No your sound card won't work. Does your computer have a little phone jack in the back of it? Well then, you're going to need a modem. I'm serious. Yep. About $100. Thank you, come again."
Yeah, that was me, dude!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hmmm...I teach a class on this to (mostly) CS students. Believe me, it's not obvious to them. Oh, here's an example from earlier in this thread: "Who can't spit out the name of your ISPs mail server while some dolt fills on the Email wizard in Outlook Express while they do something else?"
The interruptions of yammering coworkers are the hardest part of the job. The work itself, by comparison, is easy. It's finding the concentration, maintaining focus, that turn it into such a challenge.
Any employer who thinks they are saving money by doling out less square footage per "unit" is sadly deluded.
Of course, some people seem to thrive in such environments. However, when I challenge them and get them into a quieter environment, they almost always perform better. As for those who need the oversight of short walls to keep them on track, the company would be better off without them.
So we've spent 20 years designing computer interfaces that allow users to multi-task better and better, and perhaps to some extent at the expense of the task at hand. Is there merit in re-evaluating the windowing model to try to make it more single-task friendly? Since I'm working on a widget set of sorts, what would people suggest works best in helping them get through a single task? or are wizards it?
Alex
alex@netWindows.org
Dojo: defanging browsers so you don't have to
the guy whose first claim to fame is writing "Frames of Mind" seems to have some explanation for this. He claims humans posess eight clusters of intelligences (Theory of Multiple Intelligences), and, apparently, it is very possible to multitask if every task requires a different cluster, but it becomes very difficult if you're doing several things at once that are more or less similar to each other. So it's possible to whistle while driving a bike, but it's really difficult to read a book and hold a conversation at the same time. In the first case, you have true multitasking - two different areas of the brain concurrently operate without interruption. The second case is more like multitasking on a computer: the "cycles" of the brain area that concerns itself with verbal tasks have to be divided between two different tasks and both suffer as result.
Likewise I dont reccommend coding whilst operating as moving vehicle - very dangerous ...
Oracle only! http://members.tripod.co.uk/pjmoss/sql/pjm_sig.sql
Code to code, ashes to ashes?
Well.. It's very familiar debates.
:)
Do you remember when Windows 9x vs. Macintosh
multitasking debates by amateur computer geeks?
Many years ago, Win9x advocates kept saying that Mac didn't have multitasking. And they kept saying that preemptive multitasking was faster than cooperative multitasking.
We don't go back to batch processing era, though.
What is necessary now is computer user's understanding of when multitasking is better.
Actually sometimes multiprogram is enough.
Usually general users don't exploit their processing power and just switch their launched S/W, right?
More than enough task switching by the OS scheduler can be bad.
Maybe they never read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
Being it doesn't have any pictures, I doubt that any CNN reporter or producer would be interested.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Perhaps you should lok at reducing the work load to assist with your multitasking effort. Let's see, what could you cut out......?
:-)
Maybe reading and posting slashdot while trying to do all of the above!
...and then you get called in to your manager's office, because "your productivity has gone down, and you're not meeting deadlines anymore." Deadlines that were close to impossible in the first place, even if you DIDN'T get interrupted every ten minutes.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
DeMarco and Lister touch on this a bit in Peopleware. There was a relevant study done at Cornell University. A group of people were queried as to their work preferences - with music or without. They were then divided up into two groups such that each group had half "prefer music" and half "prefer none". They were then given a programming assignment to get done in a set amount of time. One group worked with music, one without. Completion percentages were about equal in each group
There was a twist in the project, though. The assignment involved inputting numbers, putting them through a series of involved mathematical manipulations, and outputting the result. The manipulations actually resulted in the output number being the same as the input number. The overwhelming number of people who realized this came from the "without music" group.
The "left brain/right brain" theorists will tell you that the in the "with music" group, the creative side of the brain was tied up listening to the music and wasn't available to make the jump of realizing the math reduced to an identity function. I don't know if that's the real explanation, but it looks like something on that order is going on.
To everyone except the PHBs, yes
I think I read somewhere (i.e a proper scientific study) that women were better adapted to doing lots of things at once while men were better adapted to concentrating on one thing at a time. The theory being that men were adapted to hunting (a single task requiring complete concentration), while women were adapted to doing all the other jobs around the cave/hut (lots of tasks perhaps not requiring the same level of concentration).
I don't believe that it is possible to multi-task without some loss of efficiency. I doubt if anybody could interrupt the debugging process to, say , answer the phone and then go back to it exactly where they left off without spending a few minutes remembering where they were, but I am quite prepared to believe that women spend less time in the "context switch" than men.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I catch myself doing this ALOT at work. I'll code a bit, get distracted by an ICQ message, then go back to a web browser rather than my vi session, and then its all downhill for the next half hour. It's a wonder I get anything done.
This is just a test of my new account, please ignore.
I guess this too varies from person to person..
A high level of interrupts is bad for throughput, too.
But the tendency to use words and analogies drawn from current technology has a long history. Popular-science accounts of the working of the brain used to compare it with a telephone exchange. At the time they were written, this was the highest vaguely relevant technology. Fifty years later, comparisons were being made with computers. Most such analogies and comparisons become misleading if you try to extrapolate from the analogy back to real life - the brain isn't a telephone exchange or a computer, after all.
Vaguely related: long ago, when the organisation I was in had far too much work for its headcount (something to do with a recession and layoffs - little changes in business) our group manager once picked on 'concurrency' as his word of the week. "Up your concurrency!" he exhorted his staff at an open meeting. A prim female voice from the back of the hall responded "Up yours."
I'm pretty sure I work best when I have three or four tasks on my queue, that I decide when to switch among. I only switch tasks when I'm stuck on one, and need to give it a chance to bounce around my subconscious for a while. This puts the context switch overhead in what would otherwise by dead time, so is efficient.
Hi there, I represent Prentice Hall books and I noticed you used a circumvention device via keyboard because you didn't pay us to access our intellectual property in the form of history. I will legally harass the university of Toronto and hold them and you personally responsible for our loss of potential income! If you weren't forced to receive one of our physcology books under a restrictive EULA then your stealing!
If you try to copy or post data on a website from one of our books then its also theft because we are money-grubbing assholes. We have a new service where our books are constantly updated electronically. You sign a monthly fee to access our books and when you stop paying us the fee we then threaten to sue you if you quote from any of our books. You should use this service and pay us royally if you want to post intellectual stories on the Internet and if you access this data from somebody else's computer when you don't have an account then under the DMCA we will haul your ass to prison. Thank You.
http://saveie6.com/
(I think I'm quite extreme case too)
I have to take this one back. As I have read more, my situation is not all that bad. But, I've become quite confident that I really suffer from CAPD, especially after I read http://www.iser.com/caparticle.html. Maybe I really should consider specialized testing to try to identify my problem. Probably not, since I have learned to recognize my problems and live with them - being 100% sure would not add much to my life.
When you smile, the world laughs at you.
can someone summarize? i didnt have time to read it all while i was beginning to build a database, watch tv, eat a sandwich, and download porn. thanks
NEWS: cloning, genome, privacy, surveillance, and more!
Just a thought, but we're told we should take 15 minutes break an hour from VDU tasks - maybe you should just chill away from the screen, rather than flip to another task?
Rob.
happy birthday. Drink a little wine and reflect on your past triumphs.
Personally I do a lot of multi-tasking as in i'm involved in at least 2 (ideally 3) different coding tasks. I actually find myself to be very productive that way.
This was actually something i recently realized. One of the projects i am involved with was put on hold due to configuration problems with new hardware that was installed, leaving me to work on a single project until the hardware issue is solved.
I find myself getting extremely bored and tired of this single project after about 5 hours or so. I end up not being able to concentrate as well and my motivation level drops considerably compared with its level at the start of the day.
Anyone else notice anything similar?
--sidster
Play lotto? Try http://www.alottofun.com/
when too much activity prevents the net from regenerating/reordering itself through rest. You then bump into the wall of catastrophic oblivion: no more information is being stored inside it. The bottom line for efficiently multitasking is to have more rest than for a simple thing, and you get it.
When you spend too much time and/or resources during the context switch.... or recovering from the context switch, that is known as thrashing . This term is old as the hills, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet.
BTW, I always tell my boss I'll work on his next request as soon as I finish the interruption to the interruption to the interruption to the interruption to the interruption to the interruption to the interruption to the interruption that I was working on before he interrupted me last.
I would agree with the basic thesis that multitasking (whether individual or computer) has an inherent overhead that reduces the overall amount of work than a simple serial-tasking method.
However, this simplistic viewpoint fails to take into account PRIORITY .
In a multi-tasked environment, seldom are all tasks of equal priority or importance. In the Real World, no two tasks have the same importance. And this is where multi-tasking wins out over serial-processing. Some jobs simply MUST be completed before others, due to either inherent attributes of the job, or priorities assigned to the work by an outside source. And a multi-tasking methodology is really the only way to efficiently process this workload.
The "most efficient" method of working varies according to the details of the workload. For those who have a low number of total tasks or where all tasks have generally the same priority, a serial system can be the most efficient, since a change in the current job's overall priority seldom occurs, and context switching is limited to times where the primary task is busy-waited. However, for environments where there are large number of tasks (and particularly where the priority levels vary greatly), Serial Processing is highly inefficient, and the context switching overhead of multitasking is more then worth the penalty in order to get "real" work done.
In my humble experience, Programmers, QA, Doc Writers, and Marketing all generally should be fit into the Should-Really-Be-Serial-Processing bin, while SysAdmins, Secretaries, and Sales derive the most efficiency in being Multi-tasking.
As always, this discussion fits the maxim:
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong- H. L. Mencken
Beward of people offering absolute answers to fuzzy questions.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
If I am doing uninteresting tasks then multi-tasking helps me get through them. Otherwise I would just sit there feeling board. However, if I really get stuck into an interesting task then please keep away, or I'll growl and then you'll be sorry!
Now, if you were chatting with your girlfriend on ICQ, or checking your email at regular intervals (like I do), you would be multitasking. Those things require you to switch from one task to a completely different one.
I don't see how you can compare the brain to a processor. If you can, then tell me, if a processor uses 0's and 1's, what does the brain use and why?
_
Or, for goat.cx wary: cut and past:/ aug/multitasking/080701multitasking.html
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2001
Software Wars
Tom DeMarco also covers this in "Slack: " ~getting past busyness, burnout, and the myth of total efficiency.
Well worth the read.
I can multitask reading books better while sitting on the ceramic throne than I can while watching TV or while replying to /. articles. So that's where those books stay most of the time.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Henry FORD made the assembly line big back in the early 1900's... and isn't that the same thing? Getting all the workers to focus on one thing all day long not only brought the industrial revolution into the Golden Age, but made cars for all!
Maybe a similar focus in technology will get us onto the other side of the information revolution and into a new Golden Age, which I will now call the Platinum Age. For no reason.
Tell a stock trader that he's going to be more "productive" by simply walking over to the gentleman he wishes to conduct a transaction with, and speaking quietly versus standing elbow deep in a pit with thousands of other guys screaming at the top of his lungs and flinging gestures at other traders.
It all comes down to the work environment. For some things, like engineering, QA, R&D, a quiet distraction-free environment is ideal. For other things, where transaction speed matters more than quality of execution, multitasking is the only way to go.
Bowie J. Poag
What sort of an article is this? Doing lots of things at once is more difficult than doing one thing at a time! Well I'm really pleased that the academics have spent loads of time and money reaching this obvious conclusion. I mean is this really news? Ask anyone who is too busy at work how much they are getting done. I used to work on a help desk and we'd get constant calls, meaning that the projects we really wanted to do kept getting put on hold. It takes a while to rememeber how far you got last time you looked at the problem. I've got a little research project going, reading crap articles about obvious conclusions wastes times. I'm currently applying for funding =) Multitasking is one of those words that didn't exist until eight years ago or so. Kinda like my personal bugbear, "Lets take this off line OK"
You aren't doing 15 things when you have 15 programms running. When I'm programming, I am *programming*. That requires exzessive multitasking for my computer. Several shells, browsers, office documents and editors opened, some small helpers and applications for communication with my coworkers. I can clutter my screen without any problems with about 20 programms - and still do one task. And that doesn't count programms that are for my comfort only - like a mp3 player. But if someone comes to my desk and disturbs me for 20 minutes talking about timelines, budget planning and other stuff I currently don't work at - I need some time to come back to my code. So please keep in mind that multitasking isn't the same for your brain and your computer.
Don't answer me. Moderate. Slashdot is about moderation, not discussion.
The famous chess players every once in a while play exhibition matches where they take on multiple players at a time. Granted the opponents are not quite in the same league as the master they are playing against , but nor are they negligible. I remember reading about Vishwanathan Anand playing with as many as 10 players at a time ( sorry don't have the link). These players also play under the same time constraint that would be applicable for a single match.
Oooh! Bright shiny object, sorry gotta go!
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Well, duh.
As if computers have made people any more efficient in the first place. How often do I work on a paper for school only to check my email, run my TV Card in a window or listen to MP3's at the same time. Computers are more for entertainment these days than actual productivity. Although they can do that too....
To anybody with worthwhile brainfunctions this is rather blatantly obvious. That they've done research on it so you can back it up is nice. But honestly, if your boss believes getting interrupted all the time *doesn't* degrade your productivity....Get a new job cause a nobrain boss can only be bad for you in the long run.
This is hardly news. 17th-century economists knew that specialization leads to a vast increase in productivity.
I dined with the Dutchess of Lee
who asked, "Do you fart when you pee?"
I replied with quick wit,
"Do you burp when you shit?"
said the Dutchess, chalk one up for me.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Aye, I wonder why all managers on earth believe their staffs could finish a timesheet in 15 mintues; it'd be a world record if one could.
Is multitasking more efficient? Shifting mental gears costs time, especially when shifting to less familiar tasks
Obviously trying to do all of them at the same time would be counterproductive, so preemptive multitasking would be a pretty bad model for a human. However, if I'm getting stuck on one particular problem, it is often helpful to switch to something else for a while until the "solution presents itself."
This probably has more in common with threads than tasks if you want to be really picky... but the lower overhead of threads might make this an excellent analogy as well. :-)
In any case, having other tasks to run while waiting on input, output or paralell processes can still improve efficiency, just don't switch tasks for no reason...
sig fault
I also multitask because I have to wait
:-)
for things to happen (specially if you are
using Win*)
But if I multitask while waiting I'm
loading the PC with more tasks so that
it will let me wait LONGER!
I've "developed" a solution: I use two
PCs on my desktop so that I can multitask
without delaying the previous task
I'll probably end up with a rack of PCs
with a Keyboard/Mouse/Monitor switcher...
:-)))
A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.
Amen. :-) Hmmm.. football or getting dragged into doing the laundry or cleaning. I'll take football. Tell me when dinner's ready!
Once you have regained your line of thought and gotten to write about two more lines of code, the phone rings, because first line of tech support (if you have one) was out for lunch, and it's your week to take second line of support. You dial up remotely to the client's machine, with the client on the line, calming him down, telling him that "it's ok, nothing bad has happened, it's just an informative message you see on the screen". The client then goes into a discussion about other things that he is wondering about.
20 minutes later, you try to figure out where you were in the code, spend perhaps two minutes getting back to where you were. You might get another ten minutes of coding in, when your manager runs in to ask about some software that he wants to install on his personal laptop.
I have had LONG days, and even WEEKS that were just constant interruptions. And then the manager DARES to complain about how I didn't meet my deadline? Jeesh! I wonder why!!!
Eventually, I quit that job.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
A couple of women I work with firmly believe that most men do not multitask well. I think I might even be inclined to agree. They make exceptions for system administrators, who are probably the most multitasking people in computers. I am almost incluined to believe.
:)
Personally, I hate questions like that. Those questions have obvious answers, and your supposed to answer them in a particular way. The test is whether you will conform
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I'm looking forward to the day when scientists have completely reverse engineered us. Unfortuneately, while we have the source code, noone understands the language yet.
; )
On a more serious note, when I'm writing some code and my boss sends me some stupid crap to post on our website, it takes about an hour for me to recover and get back into the same frame of mind. That's such a PITA, because he's constantly sending me all kinds of little pointless things to take care of.
Oh well, I get paid the same either way ; )
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It depends on what you're doing ofcource. When it involves switching between entirely different things it basicaly can make you go nuts! :P
Multytasking sux when it comes to programming. At work I ususally have 2-3 entirely different things to program wich often includes reading tons specifications too. All the time someone bugs me about this and that crashing and why and the worst thing is that these are not things programed by me but by someone else. I basycaly define my job as a "Quality Assurance programmer". AKA I read specs, and write "test case" programs all the time and try to determine why the test casees I've writen before happen to fail now and then. Now 'xcuse me but the SNMP test case just failed and they whine on my had to explain why
It sounds like your definition of top is being CTO or CEO. Those are indeed jobs for multitaskers. They involve lots and lots of concurrent tasks with lower levels of concentration than some other tasks like programming involves. Not everyone is suited to be CTO/CEO.
Some tasks are just huge. That take days, weeks, months, and in a few cases even years, of intense mental concentration. It sounds to me like you fit somewhere in between ... which is actually where most people are. It is the high concentrators, the ones with a greater possibility of having something like Aspergers Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism (search google), that multitask poorly, but concentrate effectively, and get single tasks done faster. And they are the gem holders you seek. Learn to work with them, not against them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This is no surprise for anybody who participates in certain sports.
For example - in SCUBA diving, especially technical diving such as cave diving or deep diving, task loading is known as a huge problem that the diver has to overcome. Not only is there the time cost of changing contexts, there is an additional cost in stress - and stressed divers make mistakes and die.
A diver will spend a lot of time training so that his or her attention isn't taken up by performing regular tasks - which is to say, so that their conscious attention doesn't have to including those tasks in its scheduler.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
> but explaining *exactly* where he'll go takes
> quite a bit more than common knowledge (we call
> it "physics."
Actually, the *exact* location of floor impact would be more of a chaos function, unless you are doing the experiment in a "perfect" world, where *all* forces (pressure, wind, magnetism, etc) are completely 100% predictable in all areas at all times.
If you are talking about simplifications, which are quite normal in the field of applied physics, then the knowledge of physics required to calculate the approximate location of impact is, indeed, common knowledge (at least in Norway).
Most people are also able to predict such an outcome without making calculations. I have never seen a basket ball player stop, pull out a calculator, punch in the numbers, measure the distance and direction to the basket, punch in a few more numbers, and then use some kind of measuring device to throw the perfect shot. Yet, most people are able to throw the ball to the approximate location of the basket.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
Too late. I hold the patent on the gene that sees blue.
BTW, I also trademarked the Sky and research, so make sure you put the [TM} above these words and mention me.
Yeah, you tell yourself that women are good at multitasking the next time you let your girlfriend drive and when she's looking for a particular street sign, she starts screaming at you to turn the radio down. Come on! :)
why on Earth are you on a help desk? It sounds as bad as having a colour-blind art director.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I haven't done any formal XP projects but I've certainly had the experience of developing code alongside another person, and found it works very well.
A discussion of "multitasking for programmers" and why it hurts is at Distraction: the one big obstacle. This is written for programmers, but it is true for everbyody who works with knowledge.
You found a sword: +4 damage, +5 moderator points
We didn't have computerized timesheet system at that time(I got to write one later) because CPU time was costy. We had given a stack of palm-size timesheet cards, each slot is a 15-minute interval.(I think newer IBMers could find this timecards in storage room, they've printed quite a lot of them)
It wasn't so bad when one day our new manager introducing 'time-slicing' time-management technique, that we had to fill in different tasks in each time slot, to prove that you've 'used your time efficiently'.
Time-slicing was a new buzzwords that days. Obviously he didn't quite catch the meaning of it.
Clueless managers can be found everywhere.
I've noticed that with myself... I would have thought it was kinda obvious though?
If within the period of 1 minute... Someone switches between two applications, obviously it will take them a second or two to adjust between the two (depending on the complexity of what they're doing).
IM programs also are a huge source of distraction for me... people come online, people go offline and messages are sent and recieved. I think IM programs will be the downfall of any productivity that exists whilst working unless they are removed from a work environment. I have started getting into the habit of closing them before starting any work.
Smarten up. Please. ;^)
Um, you do realize that timothy didn't add any editorial to this posting at all, right? That thing about "my manager" was said by Greyfox, the submittor of this bit of news.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
It all depends on what that one thing might be. For example, remaining focused on reading slashdot comments and making first posts and trolls probably isn't going to be very productive....
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Actually /listening/ to two conversations isn't that hard. The trick is to switch quite often, you get the gist of the dialogue and then switch. Naturally you can't give a word for word summary of what they were saying, but that is hardly useful anyways.
;-)
;-)
Most conversations are not that interesting to listen into anyways. Which I guess is a good way to practice this skill. (Fancy dinner parties and similar places, where people talk a lot without actually saying anything, are excellent training grounds. Just try to find an interesting conversation to participate in and you'll be listening in on several before you know it.
Doing it consiously is a lot harder though. It works best (for me at least) if I don't try to do it. (That is, when I'm drunk.
On the other hand, if I try to play Unreal while talking to my Mom on the phone, she usually groks that something is up.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
If you do it right, the chart does show points where work can be done in parallel, and critical parts where a little extra resources can speed up the project quite a lot. However, with the typical management gloss over the details, the software is probably going to think that "If one woman can produce one baby in 9 months, then 9 women can produce one baby in 1 month." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month) This results in completely unrealistic schedules.
I have worked on projects where project management software was critical. But if your organization is small enough that coders are usually doing multiple projects, then chances are the projects aren't complex enough to really benefit from it. That is, if you've only got 1/2 a coder to put on it and it's 500 hours of coding, then it's going to take half a year if you get him started right away, and longer than that if you mess around planning how you're going to allocate his 20 hours a week first...
wish i could do that.
"Why is all this crap here?" -- 4-year-old Brandon
Apologies for my lobotomy.
Which is why I get all my best 'creating' programming work done between midnight and about 3am. I'm still awake enough to think, but there's no phone or direct interuptions, and my girlfriend has gone to sleep. I can get that 3 hour concentration time.
I'm just very glad that my work allows me flexible working hours and the ability to work from home.
As my company went from 10 people to several hundred, the interrupt level rose dramatically© At those levels, even when interrupters are generally attempting to be reasonable, it gets to be destructive© Some of us developed an effective response©
We use a wireless network ¥wavelan, many of us work on laptops, and we have many small conference rooms© So when a programmer wants focus, they will sometimes just sneak off to a conference room and continue to work from there©
They're still able to work, reach the CVS repository, read email, but they prevent external interrupts© Not even their manager or coworkers know where they are© It works great©
I got just so much more done back in the days when i used MS-DOS than with this fancy-schmancy linux-thingy.
I can't. I have CAPD(Central Audiotory Processing Disorder). I could spit it out, if I knew what he was asking, but that's what I can't do, make sense of what I hear. If I'm doing ANYTHING else, I don't understand what somebody is saying to me, be it hitting something with a hammer, reading a book, coding, looking at a wall, if my attention is even remotely used for something else, I can't hear people.
That includes thinking of what to say when they're done talking, or if they get me thinking of something else. It's really annoying, actually. That's why I can't do the phone-monkey thing.It does have its advantages, though. I'm not easily interrupted when doing work, I don't hear people talking to me when I don't want to, it's not ignoring, it's involentary, but convenient at times. I have not trouble visiting my own little world.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Multitasking is harmful to productivity...
Well, depends on what you're talking about. First of all, if 'multitasking' is your code word for someone working on 10 projects and also having to answer questions about other projects all day, well then yes, it's going to be extremely difficult for them to complete anything. On the other hand, as with computers, there are "stalls" in projects where someone simply cannot proceed with their work, in which case it is more productive for them to work on something else for a little while. Also, in general, it is good for people to work on a few different things. When someone becomes too focused on one task, they lose their "vision" of the big picture, which can cause conflict within an organization. It is my personal opinion that multitasking is very productive but only if a reasonable, intelligent scheme is used to determine the tasks to be accomplished.
~ now you know
I see said the blind man to his deaf wife.
Actualy, modern manufacturing has moved to "cell" type manufacturing where the worker "task switches" on a limited number of steps, not true multitasking, but not one item. The task swithcing can become quite rapid once the routine is developed.
Get yourself a female partner, and after a few years a small lobe in your audio cortex will develop such that it kicks the speech centre into saying 'yup', or laughing, or making some bland response which matches what she's just said despite the fact that you really haven't got a clue what she actually has said. Every so often, while I'm intensely reading, my audio lobe will detect a joke, when in fact what's been said was tragic news, or something. Then I have to make excuses: "oh, you mean that's real - I thought you were describing some spoof" or whatever. Hello dear :-)
THL.
Keeping
Exactly, and it is not for more productivity that we quit the Ford working-style... but for a big social advance.
I don't want to do the same thing all day long, I think the point here is more about "I don't want to be bugged at work" than " I don't want to work multitasking"
And it would defenitely be a regression to go back to the Ford style, but yeah, bosses would really like it.
Time to get off the helldesk...
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
Hey I'm a girl and perfectly capable of multitasking when necessary. Can I point out that asking you to turning the radio down was probably a sensible course of action. May I also point out the well known fact that almost all girls are capable of thinking of several things simultaneously, whereas very few men are able to do this. Conclusion: girls _can_ multitask, they're renowned for it!
It was a little-bitty story near the bottom of the news page in the "Careers" section. The hurricane was the top story. I've never seen the Careers story featured as the top story of the day. But then, Monday morning is usually pretty slow for news.
It's beautiful. Just like the sun till you get too close.
Maybe the more they are sick of it, the faster they try to finish it.
When I'm going insane with soem development I simply announce that I'll be at home till it's fixed. This works because:
This works for me. I can do helpdesk duties because I'm not trying to do anything long term most of the time. Just trying help users. But when I'm programming any interrupt withing a 3-4 hour time span destroys all my concentration.
Curiously - a great many comapnies in the UK don't encourage home working. They don't have a "policy" in place(!).
Come on UK management: why are so many people taking up expensive office space, polluting the planet, wasting their lives on the train, in the car or bus and stressing themselves to death when they *could* be at home 60+% of the time and actually do *more* work?
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
There is some evidence that people who learn to speak several languages at once learn faster than those who learn a single one.
Computers multitask stupidly. Many people multitask naturally and creatively. The trick is to make it easy, painless, and pleasant.
My blog
Something to show your boss, really.
Anyway, Joel Spolsky also wrote a nice article about it recently ... worth mentioning here
I'm sure.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$ 300
.. i think. I've found that when it's something that requires brain work (umm, like coding) it's good to get long periods of continuous work. It takes some time to get into the "mood" where you just start hitting code. Also, of course, every time you start over you gotta think and "reorganize" your thoughts to the problem at hand. It takes some time too.
The World's Best Music!
One new age, diversity celebrating, politically correct company chick asked me, from her list of prepared questions, "Do you believe you multitask well?" So, I asked her, "Can you define multitask, so I can be sure I'm answering the question you want answered?"
"Doing more than one job at a time", she replied, "like debugging one minute, explaining an important process change to a coworker the next, and then going back to debugging." I thought on this for a moment, wondering if it was a trick question, an honest question, or perhaps an honest question that through the acts of self deception and corporate mind-fucking had become a trick question. So I figured I'd just be honest, and let the chips fall where they may. "No, I do not believe that I multitask well in environments such as this, and in fact I do not believe that anyone multitasks well in an environment such as this. When I worked at Burger King, as a teenager, I could make fries and fill drinks at the same time, but those were not mentally challenging tasks."
"I happen to think that I multitask very well, and don't find that it's all that difficult", she said to me. And it was at that very moment that I realized that I was not meant to work in the corporate environment. Which is fortunate, because I did not get that job, and I'm still self-employed. The PC company chick? She proved that she multitasked well by volunteering for every function that would keep her in meetings, all day every day, and for avoiding work so skillfully, but being seen rushing past on her way from one conference room to the next, she was promoted and now runs the department.
My point? There is a fallacy floating around in corporate America, that in order to produce more output with less time and fewer resources, we must all fill many roles. Instead of focusing on doing one job very, very well, we are supposed to compensate for the fact that jobs have been eliminated, but their roles have not. So we are expected to "multitask" -- and the harder we're expected to swap, the lower the work output, the lower the quality of it. We are never allowed to operate at our full potential because we cannot achieve the mental state necessary to do Great Work. We find ourselves staring at the same problem for half the day, only to spot it within 20 minutes first thing the next morning, before our minds are cluttered up with corporate crap.
Productivity and quality will not improve no matter how many policy changes and process controls we are subjected to. What has to change is the production budget has to rise in direct proportion to shareholder dividend reductions. We are not going to cure anorexia by starving it to death!
Being self employed, I no longer have to deal with the down-sized company (or being down-sized out of a job) and can focus on my work as long as the telephone doesn't ring. It always seems to be that client with the hairiest project who calls right at that moment when the feeling of an inspiration forming is building... and I let my wife answer the call and take a message. Gotta love it.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
My mom plays orchestral percussion, and used to be quite good at knitting and reading a book while counting 60 measures of rests. I don't knit or anything, and I don't think I'd be able to handle all of that if I did, but I can count rests while reading a book or having a conversation or whatever. It takes practice, and you have to count on your fingers.
Those of you who don't play percussion probably have no idea what I'm talking about...
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I was speaking in particular about my experience doing DSL tech support - the average customer IQ was considerably higher than dialup tech support. The vast majority of DSL customers know what a browser is, for example. Some of them even know the difference between a single right-click and a double left-click. We certainly got our share of bumbling twits, but that's no excuse for some of the notes I've seen.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
- The length of rat tails modeled as a Gaussian distribution.
-
It is more usual for drivers to accidently drive off the road on the convex side of the curve than the concave.
-
Cleaning staircases is more efficient top-down than bottom-up.
All of these are rumored to be worth a PhD.-- Imperial units must die --
Isn't this common knowledge? I usually try to do stuff in continous timespans, instead of switching contexts all the time.
And for obvious reasons apparently, Mac OS 9 could hardly multi-task! Looks like our productivity is going to go out the window now that we have Mac OS X.
Even if you could multitask perfectly, without any context-switching overhead, it wouldn't be the best way to operate most of the time. Most jobs are demand-driven: a bunch of people are asking for tasks to be completed. Multitasking is useful for giving the illusion you are making progress on a number of tasks simultaneously. But almost any other schedule is better for actually finishing tasks sooner.
Suppose you have ten tasks that will each take two days. If you multitask perfectly, they will all be done at the same time: in four weeks. Ten people will be pissed because you just took a month to finish a two-day job for them. If you instead finish one at a time, then nine of your customers will get their tasks done sooner. Some of them a lot sooner. Even the last task you finish won't be done any later than if you had multitasked. The advantages of unitasking are even greater if the jobs aren't the same size. By working on shorter jobs first, you minimize the average wait time while not increasing the maximum wait time at all.
Reminds me of when I am sitting at my desk, staring at code with the phone happily ringing next to me.... what phone, I ask? Whose phone?
Timothy, people like you would have rejected the invention of the wheel because "it takes so much time to chip one out of stone that you can just drag it along the ground in half the time!"
Smarten up. Please.
Bowie J. Poag
I guess CNN should know about playing both sides after reading a recent article in Roll Call magazine.
For example, my wife is incredible at multitasking. She can be having a phone conversation, slip in a quick face to face conversation, and be filling out expense reports and travel arrangements at the same time. She can also answer a 40-line switchboard while sending e-mail and ordering office supplies online -- all within a multitasking environment. However, she cannot program a computer. She simply cannot concentrate long enough or hard enough to perform this task.
I, on the other hand, can summon the mental powers necessary for programming, and can spend hours upon hours without moving from my chair, solving incredibly complex problems. But, I can't talk on the phone and eat at the same time. I cannot even perform menial tasks simultaneously without really messing something up.
So, I think the writers and editors of this article need to take a closer look. Examine people who are in jobs that TYPICALLY require multitasking -- for example: secretaries, receiptionists, press managers, etc. They'll probably find that most of these people are extremely good at what they do, and that the multitasking doesn't slow them down a bit. It just uses up idle CPU cycles.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
It's not that people can't multitask it's that any one operation is less efficient thatn if they weren't multitasking.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
maybe you can piss with one hand, not me, it takes two to hold down the fort.
This reminds me Donald Knuth who doesn't use email because he claims it ruines communication efficiency by forcing multitasking: "My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three months." http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.ht ml
I often have half a dozen (or more) things going on at once, switching between screens, applications,
and even computers regularly.
Why?
Because I'm *waiting* for things to happen. Waiting for that 3 minute web page to load,
waiting for that 10 minute compile, waiting for a reply to an ICQ, or whatever.
If I couldn't multitask, I'd be sitting dumbly staring at the screen waiting for whatever task I'm doing to
become ready for my input again.
Sure, a lot of time/energy goes in the context switch. But it's time that's wasted *anyway*.
- Muggins
I think I have the same problem although it sounds less acute. When my wife talks to me I can't hear her. The disorder seems to be hereditary because my kids can't seem to watch tv and hear their parents either...
That's hardly a scientific study. It's a mind-dump of an angry guy forced to do phone support while he's programming. While I'll agree that I feel less productive in general when I'm in a chaotic environment, I'd rather see something from a professional psychologist or neurologist. To get published they'll have to adhere to some modicum of proper analysis.
;)
Thanks.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
Is it just me or is this story kinda like say we're just like Goldfish??
Ohh look a rock
ohh look a rock
ohh look a rock
ad-infinitum (or something to the effect) Marcus
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Wow, talk about irony... This is the top story on CNN, the same day that they launch their new format that tries to show you *six* different stories at the same time. It's funny watching this story being reported by the anchorperson, while the other five sections of the screen flash and scroll around.
Peter Drucker had this concept down years ago.... Some of the best reading for ANYONE is "The Effective Executive".
At the heart of any optimal task switching, there's conceptually a simple, adaptive mechanism that weighs the (measurable) cost of switching tasks against the (expected) benefits of sticking on. Several nice comments on this thread describe this idea for CPU scheduling. On similar lines, I just published a paper on anticipatory disk scheduling (to appear in the Symposium on operating systems principles, October 2001). Idea is that synchronous I/O makes processes issue requests one after another, so the operating system deliberately tries to service many requests from each process before context switching. Unnecessary context switching can get very expensive, and the trick is to outweigh expected benefits against costs while scheduling requests.
// today's my 24th birthday. just felt like telling someone. //
This principle can be consciously used in meatspace. We all have unique levels of tolerance and overhead for context switching: measure it! For example, while coding two pieces of software, use a metric such as the number of lines modified in the last hour (diff old new | wc -l): very very hazy, but still useful. Then on each context switch, extrapolate to the next hour based on the past hour. Compare that with the number of lines actually coded for the other project in the next hour. Congratulations, this is your context switch overhead ratio.
Modulo coffee consumption, this number gives an acceptable personalized context switch frequency. There are other factors like taking a quick break to another project, but to a first approximation, this works.
Sounds very similar to me, except I didn't know it was considered an actual condition. I find it incredibly difficult to pay any level of attention to anything else when I'm concentrating on something. I'm a notorious single-tasker. I hyper-focus on whatever I'm doing. I will be vaguely aware of things that happen around me, and will be completely unable to recall them 2 minutes later.
My brother on the other hand is very good at juggling multiple things. He can be playing a computer game, and having a conversation, and paying attention to what is on TV all at once.
I'm a programmer. He's a consultant specialising in putting together the computer systems for places such as billboard (as in road-side billboards) and magazine companies. I suspect our career choices have been guided by the above traits.
I guess that means I should do all my slashdot reading in one strech, without stopping to do other tasks in the middle, like coding.
I'm sure it's true what you say but work can be modeled by a realtime system much better, so you might be much better off by working on more than one thing at a time...
I think people are afraid of being productive of being focused. That's why I listen to music while doing whatever, and I like the lessened consciousness induced by alcohol and other drugs. I don't know why, but people seem to be afraid of being too focused themselves.
Ford discover this a long time ago while setting up the production line: If the task you perform is as simple as possible (i.e. the same thing all of the time) the efficiency is the highest.
What can I say....
well... Thank you!
I suffer from all the same symptoms (I think I'm quite extreme case too), but I never had a name for it before. When someone starts talking to me, I'm remotely aware about it (sometimes not even that). Then I have to completely drop whatever I'm doing and ask them to repeat. It's quite annoying at times as other people get angry because they think I'm ignoring them. I also might miss parts of or whole sentences while trying to figure out what to say next. Actually I can't look people into eyes (or at their faces actually) during conversation, because that makes me think something irrelevant and lose part of the conversation.
Most of the time this, however, is a real blessing. I'm very good at concentrating in whatever I'm doing at the moment. And I'm still able to do several things at a time, as long as one of them doesn't include listening to any noise.
When you smile, the world laughs at you.
this....
It's the big story at the top of the page now. I'm wondering if they just pick that story from the amount of traffic that a certain story is generating. It's not exactly a banner news day but there's certainly things more important than some op-ed piece from the career section.
If that's so, you could form advocacy groups where someone sets up a site and links to the cnn story that you want to get coverage for and the people involved with that issue could go through and click them all every day.
Or more nefariously spoof ip's to make unique hits and run a script....
hmmmmmm
This is old news. In the car industry back to the Ford T model each employees are working on a specific task and not each one working on all parts of the car making process. When you focus on one task you gain in productivity. Nothing new here...
--- Bouh !!! ---
I've noticed this from my experience working as the sysadmin for a tiny ISP. For example, I'd often get calls about tough win9x/nt problems that our tech support people (both of them) couldn't solve while I'm at my desk hacking away at Perl code. In order to wrap my mind around the win9x problem (remember, it's something that two tier 2 quality tech support people couldn't fix), I had to dump all of my cached data about the code I was working on from my short term memory to make room. When I got back to the code, I would have to rebuild my problem solving information cache back close to the state it was before the call, because I'd need that information again to continue where I left off. This would usually take 1-15 minutes depending on the complexity of the call and the familiarity of the program. Given that lots of people would call me about lots of stuff, I figure that sometimes I lost at least 1-2 hours of working time per day.
If only I wasn't pulling triple duty as a sysadmin, programer, and tier 3 support... but that's another story.
I wonder what they controlled for in this study. i remember seeing a TV show where some researchers discovered that in general women are much better at multitasking then men. That study had limitations as well (the tasks were quite specific: frying an egg, doing a crossword, ironing a shirt. God knows I can't iron a shirt), but i wouldn't be too surprised if the result were accurate.
I find that if I can switch between tasks (provided it doesn't require huge swapping) I work better because I can keep interested and not get bored of one particular task that just goes on and on. If I have a couple of little jobs that I can quickly complete and feel satisfied about completing them, I feel better because I'm not just working on the mammoth project that's going to take 3 months. Also I find that in life in general I schedule my time a lot better when I'm busy, out of necessity. Last year, when I was doing uni full time, two jobs, and three amateur theatre productions in one semester, I wasted very little of my time because I couldn't afford to.
Being forced to multitask means you are in demand. I mean, right now I'm:
- thinking about the 4 projects at work I have to juggle
- writing PHP code for a side project
- checking my Apache logs for Code Red II virus attacks (399 since Sunady midnight)
- checking any IIS machines on the LAN at work to make sure they stay un-infected
- waiting for my co-league in the UK to respond via ICQ about Code Red
- Listening to my lovely wife complain, since I'm supposed to be on vacation
- Draining the Segrams VO bottle as quickly as my brain will allow
It's called being punished for being good at what you do. Get used to it - truly smart people are a valuable resource, and in demand.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
There, now you have something worthwhile to do today: much more useful than hanging around here being cliche slashdot posters.
Pretty interesting that CNN is talking out of both sides of their mouth on this one. CNN relaunced their TV news today to include MORE simultaneous information because they said users can handle more than one information source at the same time. News anchors will only be 1/4 of the screen with the rest of the screen filled with various news updates. http://dailynews.netscape.com/mynsnews/story.tmpl? table=n&cat=51180&id=200108060839000108257
Trying to think of something profound, while going for First Post.
My job in the Army was taking notes on a conversation while recording it at the same time. The idea was the a verbatim transcript of the meeting would take time when summary of key points was wanted immediately following the meeting.
Eventually I got very fast and invented my own version of shorthand. But one day I noticed that when I was taking a phone message for someone else I often had to ask the speaker to repeat or pause.
In your line of work it's most important to understand the customers problem and to reach that goal you have to form replies and queries while the customer is speaking. This interferes with your note taking.
Try pretending that you're eavesdropping on someone else's conversation while you're taking notes. That is, don't process or try to understand the information, merely use your hand as a "recorder". Base your replies and further queries to the customer on your notes.
Just an idea.
Henry Ford discovered this umpteen decades ago! He called it the production line and revolutionized the manufacturing world.
What, me worry?
Did we really need a whole research group to figure this... uhhh, hold on. (/me picks up the phone) Hello? Yeah, speaking. No, I don't want to subscribe to your newspaper. I get my news from Slashdot and CNN. Stop calling here! (/me slams down the phone) Sorry about that. Uhhhh, what was I talking about?
I worked summer's past by myself on projects and was able to complete 3 or 4 in 3 months time. Now I have co-workers who ask me a lot of questions about the code they're writing and I was only able to finish 1 project in 3 months. Often times it takes me 10 minutes to refocus what I was working on before I was interrupted... and in that 10 minute span, I'm usually re-interrupted... or interrupted whilst I'm interrupted. My productivity has shot down the toilet... and the company is paying for 2 extra hires. The company got the shaft on this deal. In short, leave me alone to code or else I'll bite your damn head off!
This is really quite off the wall. People are different; for instance, I don't focus well on a single item for long periods of time. I know people that can't multitask well. I can multitask and get more done than most people I know that stay focused. Thus, a counter-example in all respects.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
With the division of labour, look up his example On the division of labour with the example of making pins. If you do everything by yourself you'll only make a dozen pins a day. Work as a group and divide the tasks you'll be making hundreds! So in general...If people work together with each of them specializing on a certain field they'll be far more productive than each of them doing their own thing.
To me, I find multitasking to be very schedule lunch meeting at 3:30 disrrupting because, quite frankly, three aspirin, one water, doesnt matter what brand I don't need to have 100 things to worry about when I already before 8:30, not after, I'll be out of town, but you can reach me have enough to do as it is, cell phone. dog.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Many tasks that require coding skill really don't require much concentration or imagination. The fact that trivial bug fixes and maintenance, system administration routines, creating fairly obvious modules, user handling, etc, can be multitasked effectively (sometimes even making boring work more interesting) shouldn't be confused with the need for uninterrupted concentration when dealing with complex coding or design, or any other knowledge work that requires a deep use of imagination. Having your concentration repeatedly blown by trivial interruptions after a series of twenty minute mental preloads, each time just before the crucial algorithmic or structural insight arrives, isn't trivial, and we all know the real effect on productivity and quality of code (not to mention blood pressure and or sanity) this kind of "multitasking" causes. If you don't, you either haven't been facing challenging problems and deserve more interesting work, or you've been very lucky in your choice of environments to work in. I think the key to this issue is understanding that the temporary and brief focus used in multitasking is not the same brain state as the absorbing concentration of a fully developed mental flow. For some background on this check out Flow which is a pretty generic bestseller type introduction to peak performance literature. But I have to recommend a very funny and interesting programming manager's type book called Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister that describes the foolishness of managers who don't allow their programmers, researchers, and designers to concentrate. It's a short, fast read that just might give some insight into what kind of managerial incompetence you've been accidentally putting up with, and why you might want to look for work somewhere where the people have a clue about knowledge work. Never hurts to understand what a good working environment would be like... For the sake of sanity, it's probably better if the engineers choose the next management fad (since there's bound to be one) and the productivity of uninterrupted concentration might be a nice one to slip under their radar :)
One old trick to increase productivety in a multitasking environment is to increase the time slice spent on each task. Output increases when one spends more time on each task before switching to the next since fewer task switches are performed to complete a task. However, the perceived response time to new tasks increases as well.
This tradeoff happens with people as well. I call it "goal driven" verses "interupt driven" systems. A goal driven person or process will be more productive in terms of output, whereas an interupt driven system will feel more responsive.
Whether it's better to be goal driven or interupt driven depends on your role. If you are a sysadmin responsable for 100 users and their systems, you might be better off by acting in an interupt driven fasion and servicing the most important tasks first. A programmer OTOH might be more productive by acting in a goal oriented manner and finishing one programming task completely before switching to the next. The apropriate strategy reflects the role.
A sysadmin is more human oriented and is best serviced by an interupt driven strategy. Programming is inherently project oriented and thus better served by a goal driven strategy.
You wouldn't have been able to do phone support for Gateway. It was demanded of us that we be able to listen to the customer, evaluate their problem, and come up with a solution, while at the same time typing in a summary of what the customer said, what problem-solving steps we tried, and what the ultimate solution was. I wasn't able to do both of those complex tasks at the same time, and judging by other techs' notes I read, they were not able to either.
Single tasking productivity is all well and fine if no-one's waiting on your work, and you have total control. But very few people have this, so we have to multitask our activities.
Also, most people don't like to be on the end of a single-tasking help desk. Put your hand up if you like calling a help desk, and waiting an hour for an answer to a routine access request.
Multitasking is the answer - and you know that, for sure.
And yes, I do more under multitasking environments than under single environments, because I can use the "wasted" cycles in low priority background threads, which require little input. Checking on them gives me a break from the foregound threads, and helps me "look busy" for bosses who need that sort of thing.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I think I see a trend here: younger people seem more confident that they can multitask without penalty than older folks....
As one who has employed a lot of those multitasking youngsters, I am convinced that they're just delusional. Four half-assed jobs are not equal to two well-done jobs, or even one. Fifteen or 20 years ago, we were equally as delusional, and our mentors were just as aware of it. So, I don't hold it against the youngsters until they start telling me how pathetically stupid I am.
but now that I'm 41 (and feeling younger than before--I'll bet you're familiar with the phenomenon)I don't feel younger, really, but self-directed, self-sufficient, unburdened, and independent. I don't call it younger because I never felt as good as I do now when I was younger. But I think you probably know what I mean...
I think you're right.
Us old guys gotta stick together! :-)
To hell with the gray, I've been growing it back for about 10 months.
Be careful, man, next thing ya know, you'll be listening to bluegrass music and not caring who knows it! Myself, I started growing my hair out in earnest about six years ago -- it's now kept just above my waist, and I am entertained by the looks I get from people.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
So one wonders if the 'context switch' cost could be reduced by moving as much of the tasks to the unconcious? Some jobs require multitasking. Air traffic Controller, anyone?
There are jobs that multitask well together, and jobs that just get in each other's way. The three main classes of work I find myself implementing are: Automaton - Monkey coding, housekeeping, data entry, support calls, anything where 'productivity' is measured by the byte, hour or checkbox. Conscious - Real coding, system design, discussions, troubleshooting. Emulation - Non-language thinking, running ideas through visual, spatial, and physical experiments in my world model. The grokking engine which generates fresh insights and free associations. When all three are happily occupied on the same project, this is Flow, and must not be interrupted by Management, sleep, inconvenient laws of physics or death. When the task at hand does not require higher level processes, however, it is very uncomfortable not to be using them for something else. During grunt work, a consciousness with no plotting to do must be anaesthetised with music, games or psychoactive chemistry, lest it waste cycles chasing its own tail. Conversely, whilst awaiting new instructions from the emulator, it is useful to have some unrelated busy-busy to be getting on with, if only to avoid the crime of visible fidgeting or daydreaming.
"The advantage which is gained by saving the time commonly lost in passing from one sort of work to another, is much greater than we should at first view be apt to imagine it." The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Adam Smith, 1776 So maybe this can go directly to the "old news" bucket now. ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/ete xt02/wltnt10.txt