A few days back, I decided to cook for my family. (I use this
placating measure at times to cool down my angry wife). As a new age techie, whenever I
cook, I use my phone to show me the recipe. And it was the election times those
days. I did not want to miss the important updates also. So I had the TV
blasting from the hall so that I can hear the news.
Here I am - phone on one hand, a bunch of vegetables on the
other hand, ears listening to the news, on top of a brewing curry. As the
moment came, I dropped my phone into
the curry instead of the vegetables. Ooops!
It took me a few seconds to realize what I have done . And at the end, like a
macho man, I cried for help from my wife.
She ran to the kitchen thinking that something life
threatening has happened. As she saw me garnished the curry with my blackberry,
she started screaming. (By the way,
blending in phones makes the curry taste poor). “Just what are you doing in the
kitchen with your phone and the TV so loud?”. I humbly mumbled, “well, I am
only multitasking...” She said, “You MEN! All
your multitasking is about screwing up everything all at the same time!”.
What can I say? Men are from mars. Its in our genes not to
multitask. We were hunters for a million
years. When you are hiding to hunt a pig, you can't be playing angry birds in parallel. It’s a very critical
job and you have to be singly focused on the environment. Otherwise, you will soon
have a lion chewing on your back. Thousands of generations of such a practice
has taken the multitasking ability off the men's brain.
Women, my wife in particular, is a good multitasker. She
does a lot of things in parallel in a day. Small small things, you know –selling
the home when the market is good, getting the right school for the kid, every
day family health, retirement planning etc… I on the other hand, worry about big
and critical things -one at a time. Like saving Greece from the economic crisis
or when should America leave Afghanistan. This also explains why I remain
celibate for most of my married life. If you don’t get it my friends, ONLY chroeplay
leads to foreplay.
Finally, I realised that the modern man must be capable of
multitasking. So I devised my own guide. Since I am a dummy, I call it the guide
by a dummy to multitasking. With an altruistic intention I am willing to share it with you all.
Multitasking is -
when you have a list of tasks to do and you have limited time, then how you shall
distribute your tasks! For example, you have half an hour and you have to heat
some food in the microwave, attend to your baby and also talk to your boss on
the phone. How would you handle this ?
Don’t panic. Its very simple, gentlemen.
There are 2 types of multitasking. Preemptive and Non-preemptive multitasking. In preemptive multitasking you split your time
into equal slices. In one time slice you do one particular job. Once the time
slice is up, you move on to the next job. And you keep going at it in a round
robin way.
For the example we described just now, you split your 30
minutes into slices of 2 minutes each. First 2 minutes you are with the microwave,
next 2 minutes you are with the baby and then you go and check if your boss has
called. The cycle repeats.
That is preemptive multitasking.
In the non preemptive multitasking, you don’t do time
slicing any more. You start with the microwave and go until you finish the task.
The time limit does not matter. Until you hear your baby crying! That is a an
interrupt. Then you hold your microwave job and move onto your baby. So there
is a sense of priority that you follow. You don’t move to the next job just
because your time slice is up. But you are ready to jump on if the high priority task calls you. (Boy, I know its tough!)
What would you do if all your jobs call you at the same
time? Microwave calls you, the baby cries and the boss also calls. My priority
would be to run to the microwave. To hell with babies and bosses.
Finally, there is no one size fits all. Some tasks can be
solved with preemptive multitasking and for some you need non-preemptive
multitasking. Its for you to choose.
I hope you found this Dummy’s guide useful. Thank you !
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