TMI: The Multitasker's Dilemma
As soon as I get up in the morning, I open my email accounts. I have four on yahoo, and a old one on lycos that's mostly for the answer for the "alternate email" question on my yahoo accounts. I chose to break up my accounts so that I wouldn't wake up with hundreds of emails that I might not be able to sort through in a day....
On my professional email account I receive a number of email alerts/newsletters from MediaPost and Poynter Online--what I've identified and think are two excellent sources of up to the minute information on media, advertising, and journalism. Also in this account comes email that's related mostly to professional stuff--whether it's journalism or consuling or whatever, most of it comes there.
Another account--an old one from an undeveloped consulting venture--serves as a default account for Google Alerts. Google Alerts are another great way to get headlines associated with certain keywords. Some of these links are great to use in blog entries. But I haven't had the time to get to them, so there's over 1,000 alerts sitting in that email account.
I have another email account that was started under my old dj'ing name, where lots of folks I know locally email me. There's another personal email addy that I use mostly for product registrations and email related to my volunteer associate director stuff...
Then there are my two RSS readers--one personal, one professional. One RSS reader tracks all the folks I've made friends with and who I enjoy reading. My professional reader gives me the feeds of everyone I read for Corante, plus a few others who are related in some way to my Corante stuff--essentially, stuff I wouldn't necessarily link to on my personal blog,but folks that I like to comment on or just read.
At the conferece I was at, some middle-aged father remarked how his daughter is IM'ing and emailing and working on a paper at the same time--and I recalled how when I was younger, even in my late 20's, multi-tasking was a way of life. Grown-ups, esp. parents, observe the behavior of their kids and forget how they were when they were younger. How may of us who are in middle age now were the office "kid" who got the computer to play with while also learning whatever other job we were employed to perform (I was a secretary *and* a bookkeeper *and* a video store clerk *and* computer maven *and* interior decorator--all done very well.)
We adults tend to simply observe teen-age behavior and marvel at it, think what they're doing is a strange new form of genius--when it's probably an adaptation, and probably more social than analytical. Socializing, as I know from my own long social life in the 'Net, is far easier than reading, processing and understanding all that email and all those RSS feeds. 'Net socializing, too, is far easier than F2F--sometimes it's a lot like those long teen-age phone calls when you're just listening to the person breathing, waiting for them to say something.
In other words, eight open IM windows doesn't mean there are eight separate conversations going on at the same time and at the same rate of speed with the same amount of attention given to each and every person.
Lately, I've been aggravated with myself for not processing all the infomation that's coming to me at lightning speed--and for not keeping up all the social stuff in a timely manner. Thing is I'm really *thinking* about things in a way I didn't when I was younger. I'm really, really intellectually chewing on what I'm reading--analyizing it, sorting out what's true from what's hype and b.s.
I bet lots of people do that, too, for their jobs...
When I was younger, in my first career in non-profit finance, most of what I did was fairly easy, so multitasking was easy. When I started to get into portfolio management, and had to anylize reports, and couldn't drop everything to write a thank you letter to a donor, I knew things were shifting in my work and in me. I was gaining experience, taking on serious responsibility that required I engage a different part of my brain than the part that did monkey-work. I need to concentrate, for extended periods of time, not multi-monkey-task.
But now,there's so much more information coming into my world on a regular basis. Sometimes it feels like there's too much to sort through and to understand. Sure, all that information is cogitated and ruminated, but am I truly digesting any of it? Am I giving any of the stuff I read my full attention, or is it all just glanced over? I don't think it's that I've slowed down, that I'm now unable to multi-task like a teenager. I think it has more to do with the complexity of the information as much as it has to do with the sheer volume of information.
And maybe I can't write on it because there's just too much of it and enough time to make sense of it before the Next Big Scoop emerges. Perhaps it's not that I'm unable to multi-task, but that' it's just Too Much Information.
On my professional email account I receive a number of email alerts/newsletters from MediaPost and Poynter Online--what I've identified and think are two excellent sources of up to the minute information on media, advertising, and journalism. Also in this account comes email that's related mostly to professional stuff--whether it's journalism or consuling or whatever, most of it comes there.
Another account--an old one from an undeveloped consulting venture--serves as a default account for Google Alerts. Google Alerts are another great way to get headlines associated with certain keywords. Some of these links are great to use in blog entries. But I haven't had the time to get to them, so there's over 1,000 alerts sitting in that email account.
I have another email account that was started under my old dj'ing name, where lots of folks I know locally email me. There's another personal email addy that I use mostly for product registrations and email related to my volunteer associate director stuff...
Then there are my two RSS readers--one personal, one professional. One RSS reader tracks all the folks I've made friends with and who I enjoy reading. My professional reader gives me the feeds of everyone I read for Corante, plus a few others who are related in some way to my Corante stuff--essentially, stuff I wouldn't necessarily link to on my personal blog,but folks that I like to comment on or just read.
At the conferece I was at, some middle-aged father remarked how his daughter is IM'ing and emailing and working on a paper at the same time--and I recalled how when I was younger, even in my late 20's, multi-tasking was a way of life. Grown-ups, esp. parents, observe the behavior of their kids and forget how they were when they were younger. How may of us who are in middle age now were the office "kid" who got the computer to play with while also learning whatever other job we were employed to perform (I was a secretary *and* a bookkeeper *and* a video store clerk *and* computer maven *and* interior decorator--all done very well.)
We adults tend to simply observe teen-age behavior and marvel at it, think what they're doing is a strange new form of genius--when it's probably an adaptation, and probably more social than analytical. Socializing, as I know from my own long social life in the 'Net, is far easier than reading, processing and understanding all that email and all those RSS feeds. 'Net socializing, too, is far easier than F2F--sometimes it's a lot like those long teen-age phone calls when you're just listening to the person breathing, waiting for them to say something.
In other words, eight open IM windows doesn't mean there are eight separate conversations going on at the same time and at the same rate of speed with the same amount of attention given to each and every person.
Lately, I've been aggravated with myself for not processing all the infomation that's coming to me at lightning speed--and for not keeping up all the social stuff in a timely manner. Thing is I'm really *thinking* about things in a way I didn't when I was younger. I'm really, really intellectually chewing on what I'm reading--analyizing it, sorting out what's true from what's hype and b.s.
I bet lots of people do that, too, for their jobs...
When I was younger, in my first career in non-profit finance, most of what I did was fairly easy, so multitasking was easy. When I started to get into portfolio management, and had to anylize reports, and couldn't drop everything to write a thank you letter to a donor, I knew things were shifting in my work and in me. I was gaining experience, taking on serious responsibility that required I engage a different part of my brain than the part that did monkey-work. I need to concentrate, for extended periods of time, not multi-monkey-task.
But now,there's so much more information coming into my world on a regular basis. Sometimes it feels like there's too much to sort through and to understand. Sure, all that information is cogitated and ruminated, but am I truly digesting any of it? Am I giving any of the stuff I read my full attention, or is it all just glanced over? I don't think it's that I've slowed down, that I'm now unable to multi-task like a teenager. I think it has more to do with the complexity of the information as much as it has to do with the sheer volume of information.
And maybe I can't write on it because there's just too much of it and enough time to make sense of it before the Next Big Scoop emerges. Perhaps it's not that I'm unable to multi-task, but that' it's just Too Much Information.
posted by Tish Grier at 10:29 AM
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