I'm cooking dinner and committing a minor act of bloggery that may or may not go anywhere, while planning out the menu for next week with the boy, while pondering the line edits I have to do, while keeping an eye on Twitter. And this is pretty much an evening in the life of Kitty. In another forty-five minutes or so I'll have dinner ready, and I'll sit down to chew on an episode of Haven and do line edits when my head is too full of that, and then chew some on an episode of Person of Interest since it's my week to do that. And undoubtedly I'll be fussing with something else, maybe chatting, maybe working some clay with one hand while I attempt to type coherently with the other. Maybe making a grocery list, because after menu planning comes grocery lists. See, there ist method in my madness. Maybe I'll be doing that translation I promised someone that, okay, is half done by now.
I do not, as you may have gathered by now, or if you know me from meatspace at all, do things one at a time. I gather to myself a collection of tasks that need to happen and sort them into categories of things that can happen simultaneously. And it does help that some of these things are things like "finish watching this TV show" or "finish that damn knitting project," or "explore some new bands," things that require different parts of my body and my brain. But sometimes it involves sitting on the couch or at the computer and leaning forward and tabbing between five windows at once, making progress on one project and then when I hit a wall there, even a small one, rapidly moving to the next one so I can make progress and use that momentum to go back to the first.
There's been a study referenced on the internet somewhere or another, I'd track it down if I had more than a vague supposition that I saw it around, that bilingual people multitask better. On the face of it, it makes sense. When you live in a bilingual household, you get used to switching your brain back and forth through two different but both fundamental ways of thinking. So it's not much of a stretch to go from that to switching your brain back and forth from editing in one window, writing something new in another, doing a bit of HTML code in a third, and chatting elsewhere. All similar but slightly different tasks. Or, alternatively and less single-category focused, mending a skirt and watching TV and chatting and writing a story in bits and pieces. While the front of my mind is focused on the conversation and not stabbing myself with a needle, the back of my mind might be taking in the TV show and churning out other kinds of fiction. Or, as I'm doing right now, keeping an eye on a pot of soon-to-be-mashed potatoes to make sure it doesn't boil over, while blogging, while making a meal plan and a grocery list, while chatting, while turning over aspects of my childhood in my head in case I need to pull them out and pass them over for their information.
Everybody does this. And even as I'm typing it there's an element of caterpillaring in here. You know what caterpillaring is. It's what happens when someone asks the caterpillar (or the centipede, as it seems to be more commonly known) how on earth does it move all those legs at the same time. Having to think about it, the caterpillar (or centipede) realizes it has no idea, and promptly topples over. So, Kitty, how do you cook and do household tasks and blog and chat and prepare anecdata all at the same time? I'll tell you! .... I don't know. But everybody does it, and the trick to doing it well is knowing what kinds of tasks you can balance and how many of each of them you can juggle before you and all your tasks fall flat on your face.
I'm bad at this. I'm better than I used to be, so we'll say I used to be really bad at this. There was a time not so many years ago when I would write six to eight projects around Nanowrimo pretty much because I could. There was no question of whether or not it was a good idea, or whether or not I could in the sense that I was capable of doing this in any sort of rational or healthy manner, I was physically and mentally capable of writing 350,000 words in a month, so sure, why not?
Oh the reasons I could give you why not. So many reasons do I have.
(When you're blogging no one can tell that you took a five to mash some potatoes.)
(Or decanting some spices.)
Doing multiple things at once isn't a bad thing. It's a sad truth that one's ability to do a task well goes down with every additional task you pile onto what you're doing; this is the reason people who talk on the phone and drive and put on their makeup and drink coffee, cause accidents. But it's also true that doing something, especially doing it well and to completion, gives a little upswing. A little bit of momentum or at least positive energy (aka dopamine) which can then be converted into forward momentum or energy for one of the other things you're doing. Just looking at my list of tasks, half of them involve short, simple things stacked on one after the other, next to one or two longer or more involved things. Probably half the reason I've been successful with my line edits so far is because I've been doing them in conjunction with smaller tasks I can finish so I'm not going dear god will this project never fucking end? Because I will. I know it, you know it, my editrix definitely knows it.
So, now I've almost finished making dinner. I've got my menu for the rest of the week, and the shopping list to go with it to give the boy since he's the one who goes by the store with the discounted meat and at the hour when it's discounted and stuck out on the shelves. That's three tasks done, and I still have a couple hours left in the evening to do all my blogwork, and whatever else goes along with blogwork. Most likely chatting and eating dinner, and possibly some line edits, and maybe some knitting, coding, or playing around with modeling clay. And whatever it is, I'm sure it will be full of little dopamine mines going off in my head and keeping me moving forward in any of the half-dozen tasks I've set for myself tonight. I may not get it all done by the time I trudge upstairs to bed, but I'll at least have a good chunk of things whacked out. And that's more than enough to be going on with.
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