Hands trembling.
Fingers aching.
Mind racing.
Eyes searching.
My name is Cheyenne Haslett, and I am a multitaskaholic.
I can’t help it. None of us can. We are all victims to its controlling grasp: we multitask, and we know it. (We’re also sexy, and we know that, too.)
Some may think that multitasking is a godsend—it’s in the name, you can do MULTIple things at once… What’s the problem with that?
This is the first way that multitasking will draw you into its deceiving ways. According to the Universityof Arizona, by adolescence, a girl’s corpus callosum, which is the part of the brain that allows for the switching between different thoughts, is 25 percent larger than boys.
So maybe girls can multitask better or switch between subjects faster, but being a girl, let me speak to all the boys out there: you are not missing out.
Take the other night, for example. I had finally caught my mother at a time where she was sitting down at her desk, doing what looked a lot like nothing. After much convincing, she decided she could pencil me in and read my research paper. This was great; I could get an English major to read my paper. Things were looking up for me and the eight pages I had told myself would get me a passing grade.
But then multitasking had to come along and ruin it.
As soon as we sat down at my computer to read and edit, my fingers began to tremble. iChat sat in the corner of my screen, looking seductive in its turquoise and white, cloud-like appearance. It was waiting for me to open it, to let it bounce up and down with joy, and to chat with anyone on my buddy list.
Luckily, I resisted opening the application and doing what I do every time I sit down to do work, which is multitask my way into procrastination. I do my Spanish homework with my physics UTexas problems up and my English essay open, as if at any given moment I’ll turn into Jimmy Neutron, have a brain blast and realize that doing energy problems in physics is just the answer to finishing off my English essay.
But what really happens is that I give less and less of my undivided attention to each item requiring just that. It was too late, though; my mom had noticed that my attention faltered (possibly due to the fact that she had just repeated herself six times, eliciting no response from my distracted corpus callosum, even if it does have a 25 percent advantage over half of the adolescent population).
“Cheyenne, this should be a different sentence,” she told me.
“Cheyenne, are you listening to me…”
“Cheyenne!”
“Cheyenne, do you want me to read this or not?”
“CHEYENNE, you need a period here, ok?”
From there, it all happened so fast: she was pissed, I was out of an editor, and more importantly, I had a problem to deal with.
I had to stop multitasking from ruining my life.
Yet the next day I found myself texting in class (only important messages to my mom about… well, about my Counties dress, but that’s as important as any decision and whether my dress is jet black or turquoise is a very important decision…), simultaneously doing my Spanish and math homework during my free period (those 40 minutes need to be used as fully as possible), and taking notes in English while also post-it-noting rhetorical devices into my book and looking up the imperfect on my computer.
Maybe I get twice as many things done at once, but at what cost?
It’s true that students at Staples have their plates full and that sometimes it’s necessary to give just a little less than our unbroken, wholehearted, absolute attention to every little worksheet or homework assignment. But when multitasking takes over, when doing everything at once comes to mean doing everything wrong: that’s when you know it’s a problem.
It may be time for a deep breath and some focus to head my way. But until then, I have emails to answer during physics, texts to respond to during lunch, and friends that I need to catch up with while I do my homework on the Gilded Age during free. Or better yet: I’ll just do them all at once.
