There are three keyboards here.
And in this case that also means three computers. The eagle eyed will spot a fourth keyboard and computer but they aren't commissioned yet.
There is no such thing as multi-tasking, no matter what anybody tells you. Not for men, not for women, not for computers. In the case of computers they do things quickly enough that it appears that the interleaved processes are happening simultaneously - on a good day at least. Unless of course the computer has multiple CPUs and where tasks can be scheduled separately on each, even then these tasks are interleaved with many others.
With humans though it turns out that when we attempt to multi-task what happens is it takes us longer to complete the set of tasks than if they had been worked on in separate blocks of time. We would be better served by maintaining focus. And we would be much less likely to cock up.
I currently have the "cow of shame" (not quite visible here) due to being the person that most recently cocked up. The cow is a token that we pass around, it's a lighthearted mechanism for reducing tension and I don't feel at all bullied by it. No really I don't.
Multi-tasking doesn't work. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
It's also true.
But wait, that's no answer.
Ok, you might say that humans can do all sorts of stuff simultaneously. Our autonomous nervous system is controlling, monitoring, changing, managing all sorts of processes all the time. The key there is that is autonomic, self governing. So what about an activity where we are more involved, such as when we cross a road. A situation where we are making a massive number of calculations about the speed and distance of approaching vehicles. There is a tremendous amount of subconscious activity taking place, and this activity is using processing power of a sort, so is that multi-tasking?
No it isn't.
Like a computer with multiple CPUs the human can 'run' multiple tasks simultaneously, but not those of conscious focussed tasks where our attention is devoted to something. For example when reading and listening to music, where one of the tasks is completely passive, you are missing huge chunks of what is happening when you are focussed on the reading. And so this is the case with any selection of tasks.
So there it is, a rough and ready, comprehensive and conclusive argument. Not even hindered by my usual 5 minutes of Google based research due to me not wanting to context switch from typing.
Don't judge me, this only had a 10 minute time block allocated to it, and I was distracted by Antiques Road Trip.
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