Multitasking myth

Hi Everyone!

As I poured hot water into my teapot for a close friend's tea and stirred my coffee simultaneously, she remarked that I really was 'the full package'. Having known her for eight years I asked what on earth she meant and she pointed out what I'd just done, multitasked and she remarked that she'd 'never seen a man do that'.

I thought for a moment and told her, I did not recall a time that I could not multitask. So, I wondered about it for a little at work last night and this morning I looked it up. I was excited that maybe I'd stumbled upon something epic regarding transgender women.  

  Well, multitasking is the performance of two or more tasks that we already are quite competent at, nobody can perform two tasks where one of the tasks has never been performed before by the multitasker. It could be talking on the telephone whilst typing, or stirring coffee whllst filling a teapot for a friend etc.

Oh my, it's a bit of a myth.... No study has proven that women multitask better than men. It is thought we are slightly better at performing tasks that we know simultaneously, but not significantly so.

Well, I know I have always been female, so that's enough for me. The lightbulb moment, over my head has extinguished. Pooh!

Celia xx

You're a woman, you multitask, so what

I'm a woman, I multitask just fine.

I realize I am cutting my response really thin, but the human mind cannot physical accomplish two or more voluntary tasks, requiring 100% concentrated thought, at the same time.

If you can tell me that you can write a complete sentence without error at the same time having a detailed conversation about something completely different - then you are blowing smoke.

I have hired as many as a 100 employees in my business career. I was always suspect when someone would tell me they are good a multi-tasking. What most were trying to tell me was they could accomplish task in a sequential fashion.

There is a very valid reason why some states do not allow even a 'hands free' conversation on a cell phone. It is impossible to keep track of all of the traffic around you while talking about stopping at the store for milk.

There was a day when, after being presented an interesting land deal that I started to put the deal together in my head. I had left a town about 15 miles south of San Jose (where I lived). I was deep in thought when I finally realized that I had driven 10 miles past my home in San Jose, through the Santa Cruz Mountain to a little town called Scotts Valley.

Some might say - well, you were able to drive, weren't you. Yes, I could drive, but getting back to my original posit - I was not very conscious while I was driving if I managed to miss all of the very identifiable sights of where I should turn off the highway to get home.
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Multi-tasking computers cannot perform simultaneous task as fast as two computers running the same software. The multi-tasking computer needs to rob CPU cycles slowing the total process down. But, multi-tasking computer are very efficient in the cycles they use to perform simultaneous calculations.

The human mind just isn't built that way.
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Sorry, I have been watching the news WAY TOO MUCH lately.

Wasnt there already a thread about this, in this same forum? I could have swore there was.

In any case, when my dad is playing videogames with me, he cannot talk and play at the same time. It is annoying because I always beat him at the game and still have conversations at the same time.

Thus I don't know if multitasking is actually female, or male. Because they say males have better hand eye coordination. And my hand eye coordination is better than my dad. And I think I have a much easier time to multitask. It seems kind of interconnected. Even though my dad is cis and more physically masculine than me and into more sports things. So it does not quite add up.

As a parent you soon learn multitasking, not neccessarily literally physically doing two things at once. But having several things going on a once. Have you ever cooked, itself a job requiring coordination with a baby on one arm? Keeping several balls in the air at once, that's mulitasking. You simply cannot always do everyhing sequentially in that scenario which is why women were tradionally better. You have maintain a big picture in your mind.
Some people sre better at it than others and you can get better at it with practice.

When I say multitask, I'm of course not referring to the biological ability to literally do more than one thing at once.

If I'm typing this, I'm not singing a song and reading a book and eating a sandwich at the same time. Physiologically impossible.

But, I could be typing this, while listening to music and singing with it, while reading something I'm typing a copy of onto a word document file and occasionally taking a bite of a sandwich.

Women are great at multitasking, because, we also might be sitting with a baby on our laps while doing all of the above (I've done this before, during the period 95-98 with my son).