Failures of multitasking
I could probably come up with an extensive series of articles on how, although multi-tasking is awesome, there are so many glorious ways to fail at it.
Or one long article with many examples. I'll settle for shooting off one quick example instead.
Consider a busy day, where your computer is chugging because of some new security patch getting automatically downloaded. You go to open one window in your database program. It takes some time. So you're sitting there, waiting for it to finish loading. Getting impatient and thinking, "I'll just work on this other file in the meantime."
Half an hour later that other file might be done. And maybe you've taken some phone calls. Perhaps gotten a fresh coffee. Checked out the silly headlines.
Oh look, not enough Obama in town. What will Chicago ever do? And the Flavia sourced coffee is rancid as ever.
You're back at your computer, the window has loaded in the database program.
You have no idea why it's open, so you close it.
Then it hits you, there was a query you had to run.
It took 5 minutes for the window to open, but half an hour has passed.
And it's closed now.
So you re-open it. Again, a delay. The cycle begins anew.
Failure of multitasking.