The Atlantic has an article by Walter Kirn called “The Autumn of the Multitaskers”, which came to my attention via Slashdot, posted under the title “Multitasking Makes You Stupid and Slow”. I found myself wincing in several places, as I am one of those multitaskers, albeit not as pathological as the cases he describes.

Yesterday I finished Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface, which promotes a better direction in computer interface design. Raskin spends several chapters introducing the fact that humans have a single “locus of attention” and the consequences of this fact for the devices we use. Kirn would appreciate Raskin’s approach, which starts with what the brain is and then determines an appropriate interface, rather than starting with what we wish the brain was. Kirn says:

“Much of the problem is the metaphor. Or perhaps it’s our need for metaphors in general, particularly when the subject is our minds and the comparison seems based on science. In the days of rudimentary chemistry, the mind was thought to be a beaker of swirling volatile essences. Then came classical physical mechanics, and the mind was regarded as a clocklike thing, with springs and wheels. Then it was steam-driven, maybe. A combustion chamber. Then came electricity and Freud, and it was a dynamo of polarized energies—the id charged one way, the superego the other.
“Now, in the heyday of the microchip, the brain is a computer. A CPU.
“Except that it’s not a CPU.”

In an airport this last summer I saw a woman wearing a shirt that said: “Coffee: Do Dumb Things Faster”. Yes, I drink coffee and multitask. Here’s my excuse, though: I have a lot of dumb things to do that have to all get done at once, and quickly. There, I said it. I need a staff, or at least an administrative assistant, and since I don’t have either, I have to be my own staff. My name is Legion, but all of us need to use the same brain. Kirn remembers:

“…scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Such scenes were, for a time, cinematic shorthand for the frenzy of modern life, but then communications technology changed, and those operators lost their jobs.
“To us.”

I could go on strike against myself, I suppose. Take a stand against the Man. Except I’m the Man.

I’ve mentioned David Allen’s book Getting Things Done before, which promotes the reclaiming of a “mind like water” by creating a paper-and-Pilot operating system to which one can perhaps delegate this crazy context-switching nonsense; he understands the single locus of attention. As a user of his system I can agree that it basically works.

But like any technology that attempts to increase capacity, there is a great temptation to fill that capacity, leaving us shortly in the same position as before, except for the tremendous thrumming sound in the background from the labor-, time-, or attention-saving devices that have migrated from luxury to necessity.