Multitasking

October 25, 2006 at 9:02 am

I believe that humans are not capable of multitasking. Well, to put it more precisely, humans are not capable of carrying out multiple tasks at once with the same quality as if when they were carried out separately. I guess example would be nice.

Let’s say it takes 30 minutes for Ian to do his math homework and 30 minutes to eat his dinner. For Ian to do his work concurrently, it will not take him 30 minutes but maybe 45 minutes.

You might argue…

“But if you were to do it one after another, it will take 1 hour, so in the end you have saved 15 minutes!”

But there’s an another problem. Not only the time it takes to do the work gets handicapped but the quality of the work itself get degraded. So for our poor Ian, his homework will be done in a sloppy way and he wont able to enjoy the joy of eating his pork chop.

Again, you might say…

“So, be more carefule when doing your work! And quality will be the same!”

Well… then the work will take more time, which might result in same or longer duration as doing the work one after another.

Clearly, it is inefficient to multitask for us homo sepians.

Why am I talking about this?

(to be continued…)

Tags: multitasking

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