Effective Multitasking

As humans evolve from mostly singletasking to mostly multitasking, it is helpful to document how to be as effective a multitasker as possible, as well as refute myths and pseudoscience spread by singletaskers who are fighting this inevitable evolutionary step.

Rules

Some rules for being more effective at multitasking:

Prefer IRL interactions to virtual interactions, e.g.

Prefer speaking to the people in front of you rather than the phone that is ringing, i.e. don't answer your cell phone while talking with people in person, let the person calling leave a message (or preferably send a text message instead, see CommunicationProtocols for more on that).

Suggestions

Incrementalism - increase your multitasking load incrementally. That is, try doing 2 things at once before 3, and get good at 2 things before trying to get good at 3. Etc.

Resources

Blog Posts

2007-07-04 What's a little texting between friends? by Sean Bonner
2007-07-02 Evolve or Die by Willo

Criticisms of Multitasking

Socio-cultural reactions

As multitasking breaks from established social-cultural conventions, it scares many people and makes them uncomfortable as well, causing them to often lash out irrationally. It is important to note and catalog these reactions, as well as calm refutations thereof, and then follow-up appropriately to the reactionary comments.

Continuous Partial Attention

When multitasking, it is often said that one is paying continuous partial attention to each task, but that phrase is both too narrow a framing, and has a (deliberate) negative bias against multitaskers.

The following resource(s) provide criticisms of multitasking and should be debunked: