Do You Ever Single-Task?
Pause for a minute… now if you are on a laptop count how many tabs you have open at the moment. If you are anything like me, and the majority of us, that number is going to start at 20+. To be exact I have 28 tabs opened on my Macbook right now. One has a YouTube video I started to watch but paused. The reason it is paused is because I found a great article on Medium that I hoped to read but did not. That article had a link to a Wikipedia entry on Grunge that made me go back to YouTube in another tab to play around with another video I won’t finish watching. Do you see a pattern here? All of this happend with Spotify blasting in my ears. Sounds familiar?
Multi-tasking - I think everyone says they are good at it on their resumes, but have we really thought what it actually means or the implications it generates for our ability to work or study? When dealing with lots of tasks at the same time does it mean that we deal with them well? We found a great video (via The Atlantic) that argues to the contrary. They created an interesting initiative: single-tasking is they way to go.
The initiative from The Atlantic is called #tablessthursday, a day of the week where you agree to use just one tab of your browser and no more than one. The idea is to single-task while you are online and allow you to reflect on you normal behaviour while surfing the web as opposed to being caught up in the usual onslaught of online content.
Ready to give it a try? Do you think it will be hard for you? tell us about your experience in the comment box.
