Hi, my name is Josiah Rogers, and I’m a chronic multitasker.

That’s right, old habits die hard.  I read the stupid article with the stupid evidence that says multitasking is stupid and it still didn’t stupid work.  I know multitasking is bad, but it’s been a pain to try and quit.  So now my hand is trembling like a drug addict's as I type this with my phone in my drawer.

I closed the seven or so tabs on my browser to type this.  I hope you’re happy.

“Multitasking” is chronic.  It goes hand in hand with procrastination for me.  Every minute or so I swap from English papers to YouTube videos to text messages to math problems to psychology quizzes, etc, ad nauseam.  It’s exhausting and to be quite frank I think it’s a problem.  Damn you, whoever wired my monkey brain!

But all jokes aside, in the words of 20th century American poet Jimmy Buffett, “Some people claim that there's a woman to blame, but I know it's my own damn fault” (Margaritaville.)  Assuming, of course, that the person who wired my monkey brain is God and, as Ariana Grande posits, God is a woman (God is a Woman.)  But regardless, the main point still stands; it’s my own damn fault.

But back on to how multitasking is exhausting, because I have to add in a part about how it relates to the article.  I find the experience of switching between tasks to be a sort of productivity paradox for me.

In Sarah Spark’s article, she summarized studies that found the brain has a “lag,” or an intellectual bottleneck of through-traffic on our neuron-firing freeways when switching tasks.  This, in essence, makes multitasking inefficient because of this lag.  You’re still making the same number of decisions, it just takes more time to complete them because you’re constantly swapping tasks (Studies on Multitasking…)

The paradox, however, comes because my brain gets easily bored.  Recently I was diagnosed with ADHD (to the surprise of no one who's talked to me for more than five minutes.)  And to up the ironic ante, multitasking is least effective for those with attention disorders (Sparks, Sarah.)  My attention drifts and alights again like a frantic hummingbird buzzing from flower to flower, wings beating at thousands of flaps per second, strung out on nectar and pollen or whatever hummingbirds eat.  I’m not opening another tab to try and find out what hummingbirds eat for fear of getting lost down yet another Wikipedia rabbit hole (I’ve counted five so far, but there may be more.)

I know; I can hear you sighing.  Wikipedia isn’t a proper academic source and was created as a byproduct of Lucifer’s fall from Heaven.  But I’ll have you know, I audibly shouted “Not today, Satan!” as I stopped myself from clicking where I have Wikipedia bookmarked on my browser.  And I still don’t know what hummingbirds eat.  Life is full of mysteries.

I suppose this “paragraph” has dragged on enough; I ought to end it now before I make you read a novel.  To quote the venerable Mr. Twain, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

I caved.  Hummingbirds eat bugs and nectar (Genier, Lisa.)  You learn something new every day, huh?  And I didn’t even use Wikipedia.  Not today, Satan!

Good thing I checked the list of requirements for this paragraph (which has long surpassed the length of any sane author’s paragraph and now closer constitutes a short essay detailing my slow yet steady descent into madness as all English majors experience.)  I almost forgot to tie this all up to Davidson’s premise.  I didn’t do it at the beginning of the paragraph because as we’ve already discussed, procrastination comes hand in hand with multitasking.  I suppose I ought to do it before we part ways.

The constant grind of the modern American lifestyle necessitates multitasking, regardless of inefficiencies.  One must juggle many tasks simply as a part of getting work done; from research to communicating with collaborators to constant “progress reports” justifying one’s existence and livelihood to a faceless corporate entity.  And to be quite frank I’m not sure if we can adapt - I know I certainly have not adapted well to multitasking.  As this paragraph’s word count can attest to.  Perhaps Billie Joe Armstrong put it best; “All grown up and medicated, I’m high on cellular waves… …it’s a new catastrophe” (Somewhere Now.)

And that about wraps up my experience with multitasking.  It mirrors what the studies show; it’s a lot more “multi” than “tasking.”

This work was originally a class assignment.

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