100 YEARS OLD AND STILL MANAGING HIS TIME BADLY...

YESTERDAY morning I received an email inviting me to spend a large sum of money on a one-day course teaching about multitasking and time management.

Since I was already doing two things at the same time (scribbling this column and reading my emails) and was also suffering from a timemanagement problem, I paused to consider it.

My time-management problem was an annual affliction similar to jet lag. I suffer from this on the Monday in March just after the clocks have gone forwards. When that happens, I always fail to adjust to the management of time causing loss of one hour’s sleep and resultant doziness when the alarm goes off an hour earlier than my circadian rhythms expect. Could I, I wondered, learn to manage this time change better?

Then I started wondering whether multitasking was a good idea and whether wondering about two things at the same time counted as multitasking or whether it was just multiwondering.

I recalled reading, not so long ago, some research on multitasking which suggested that most of what people think of as multitasking isn’t really multitasking at all. Proper multitasking involves genuinely doing two or more things at the same time. Instead of that, people who think they are multitasking are really just hopping from one thing to another and back again. It’s their way of disguising the fact that they are distraction prone.

The researchers had created a task to test whether people could genuinely multitask which involved trying to keep track of two distinct patterns at the same time. I was hopeless at it. Even people who seemed able to do two things at the same time performed significantly worse at both of them than if they had been concentrating on doing them one at a time. Only very few people (I think they said it was around two per cent) showed a genuine ability to multitask without it leading to worse performance at both tasks.

I have found that some things however combine very well using a scuttling-between-them technique. I think I have mentioned before how doing one’s tax returns and making puff pastry go beautifully together. Since the pastry needs rolling out and putting back in the fridge every 20 minutes and 20 minutes is also the maximum time one can spend doing tax returns without getting infuriated by them, the two dovetail into one another perfectly. Equally, waiting for dough to rise and watching a film, or long, slow cooks and Wagner operas, or any cookery that involves occasional stirring and any programme on TV that is constantly interrupted by adverts all make perfect multitask partners.

As I said, however, I was writing this column when the time-management invitation arrived and I’m not good at multitasking. So reading the email totally drove from my head whatever it was I was intending to write about. So I’ve written about this instead.

I don’t think I’ll go to the timemanagement course. What with the jet lag slowing me down, I fear I cannot fit it into my hectic schedule.