A former Chief Minister of an Indian State is the father of eleven. He has an original explanation for this. It happened that he was in the Opposition when the government urged the citizens to stop at one child or two. Being in the Opposition, he thought it was his duty to oppose every government policy. The rest, as they say, is population.
I am no politician, but I realise that over the years I have often been on the wrong side of fashion. When it was fashionable to take to the outdoors, I was the great indoors type. When it was fashionable to wear hair short, I wore it long and vice versa. Now, when it is fashionable to multitask, I monotask. It is not that I cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, as it was said of a U.S. President, but I choose not to.
The joys of monotasking are many, as I have often maintained. Multitasking might save you time in the short run, but in the long run, it is monotasking that wins out. For example, were I not monotasking right now, but listening to music, watching cricket on television and trying to keep the cat away from the furniture, that last sentence might have ended: “… bat in the oblong ruin, iris no asking that swims trout.” Or something similar, thanks to the dreaded autocorrect. More friendships have been destroyed and more business relationships ended by the autocorrect than the bubonic plague.
Today’s writers need to focus on the mechanics of their job or they might end up writing a modern Finnegans Wake which has been described as “a 628-page collection of erudite gibberish”. Clearly James Joyce was not focusing when he wrote, “But Noodynaady’s actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines.” I suspect he was multitasking, dreaming of winning the Nobel Prize, wondering whom to borrow money from while at the same time attempting to vacuum his carpet and sharpen his pencils.
With the arrival of the cellphone, and increased digital obligations, our generation’s chances of monotasking (for the greater glory of our work) have died. Once someone discovered you could text, drive, change the music in your car, scream at a pedestrian and recall the first lines of a sonnet simultaneously, multitasking had overtaken us. It became a sign of extreme manhood or super womanhood to be able to do half a dozen things at the same time.
Yet, periodically we are told that mono is better than multi when it comes to tasking. Some years ago, a Stanford University research team came to this conclusion. Then the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that an interruption of even two seconds doubled the number of errors in a given task.
We monotaskers have only one thing on our minds. Let me stop writing while I try to recall what it is …
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
