Monday, February 18, 2013

Multitasking is evil?

I was reading an article on therumpus.net yesterday. It was about some things about mediocre. One interesting section caught my attention is multitasking. The author was trying to established a point that multitasking is evil. We should avoid it. I remember I have seen similar idea in other popular best selling books. What is so evil about multitasking that turns these people against multitasking.

The first and most common thing in these articles is statistics. They provide such and such statistics to justify how our brain fail to perform its regular operation while multi tasking. Okay buy that. Now what? So our brain cannot perform multitasks. Well, I have a problem with the statistics and experimentation as well. Surely, our brain can multi task, you don't pause your breath to see what you have in front of your eyes. What is missing? I think most of these statistics is flawed because when we measure these statistics we essentially ignore the bias of instrument we are using for the experiments. Sure, you cannot text while drive but that does not mean you cannot do anything!

Well, if that is true we can design a whole variety of things those are multitasking friendly. Or can we make multitasking friendly instruments? I think it could be whole different area of product design philosophy. The author of that article cannot play chase while talking on phone and so he asked us to avoid multitasking. But suggestions would be change the design of the phone so that our author can play chess while talking without interfering one another. Is such a design possible?

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