manuel odendahl_systemprogrammierung & dj
24. November 2010 von Chris(click the pix) Computers are nice. They are fast, they never forget things (if you do backups regularly), and they allow you to access the knowledge of a lot of other humans instantly (with an internet connection). This removes a lot of interruptions in your daily life. For example, we had ants in our kitchen this morning. I looked up how to kill ants and repel them in a green way. 2 minutes later, I had sprayed some soap water on the poor ants that made their way into the kitchen, and put up a mound of coffee ground near the hole they came in through. In less than 2 minutes, the problem was solved in a quite ecological way. This could potentially have cost me significantly more time before, and I may have resorted to pesticides because that’s what a shop owner would have told me to do. Computers speed up my thoughts, allowing me to concentrate on the things I like.
However, if you use the wrong software, this efficiency can turn into a very distracting thing. The computer can make you think that you can multitask, that is do two things at once: watch a film and read a book and talk with 18 people at the same time. That’s possible, of course, but the attention you give these individual parts will be less than every a fraction of what your full attention is. Sometimes that’s fine, but to me it doesn’t feel right anymore. Now I try to just watch a movie, and quiet my thoughts even while doing that. Or talk with only one person, and quiet my thoughts while doing that (that’s *much* harder for me :). Because if you don’t, you miss so many clues that something may be wrong, so many signs that things are good, so many beautiful details.
Because I want to get a lot of things done, and because I like a lot of people, and because a lot of ideas interest me, I found an alternative to multitasking: batch scheduling. I break up tasks into small parts, and instead of trying to do 2 big tasks at once, I interleave the small parts, giving them my full attention, and using the computer to store the “paused” task. I don’t want to do that for my friends and my private life (although I use highrise for clients and work related tasks), but that means I keep forgetting things :]
Inspiration Lounge Interview by le tapir: Manuel Odendahl Part I | Part II
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