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Question of teh Day

By lex, on August 25th, 2009

Think you’re good at multitasking?

You’re wrong.

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August 25th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: Small Stuff

14 comments to Question of teh Day

  • stormy03bravo
    August 25, 2009 at 8:01 am

    Speaking of multitasking, Air&Space had an excerpt of the book by the British Apache Pilot that was just released and the two things that were interesting about training to fly with the monocle was that almost all of the pilots would get headaches from using it – and with training, it didn’t alleviate the headaches, it just put them off further – and that he was able to read two different books at the same time after mastering the monocle.

  • ProwlerAMDO
    August 25, 2009 at 11:40 am

    Lex must have been doing something else while writing this post, he mispelled the word “the”

    • Snake Eater
      August 25, 2009 at 12:23 pm

      On the very slight chance that you don’t already know the mispelling was intentional…e.g… San Diego vs. Sandy Eggo…government vs. gubbmint…its some kind of cloyingly precious arcane Navy thingy…quien sabe!… Best

      • ProwlerAMDO
        August 25, 2009 at 6:09 pm

        I presumed he did it intentionally, it just felt like lobbing a softball underhand for a bad joke. No offense meant by it and hope none was taken.

    • Quartermaster
      August 25, 2009 at 3:14 pm

      It’s also a very common typo. I suspect, this time, Lex did it intentionally.

  • Marianne Matthews
    August 25, 2009 at 1:24 pm

    Was never very good at multitasking. I abandoned it for good when I turned 70. Now my rule is: one crisis at a time. Works better.

    Marianne

  • SpazSinbad
    August 25, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    Rapidly monotasking (being distracted by many Googlies) here ’tis Ed Macy article: http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/Apache.html

  • SpazSinbad
    August 25, 2009 at 1:47 pm

    Complete text of article (rather than 13 web pages) here: http://tiny.cc/zina7

  • Quartermaster
    August 25, 2009 at 3:13 pm

    My observation is most people regarded as good at multi-tasking are actually time share computers, so to speak. They are simply good at re-directing attention. Combat Pilots, Airline Pilots in hard IFR, Motorcycle Riders in heavy traffic, are good examples of people multi-tasking. People trying to read several things at once, or read something, email somebody, listen to radio and watch TV at the same time, aren’t any of them wel because your mind get’s overwhelmed as you are making demands of the same part of the brain at the same time. The earlier list consists of people that are doing multiple things, but they are making different types of demands that may overlap at times, but it can be handled in a sequence. Even those fail at times. Combat Pilots don’t see the golden BB, and hard IFR bites off a Pilot here and there, along with a few hundred other people riding behind him..

  • virgil xenophon
    August 25, 2009 at 3:27 pm

    You can be overwhelmed at times. The SAM threat w. assoc radars was so 360 ever-present going North in Vietnam that many of us just dialed the squelch on the RHAW gear down all the way rather than listen to the aural bombardment of multiple sounds, beeps, warnings, etc., and used the old Mk 1.0 eyeballs instead.

  • shadow
    August 25, 2009 at 4:02 pm

    Be interesting to see how these folks would evaluate TAOs….

  • Curtis
    August 25, 2009 at 4:50 pm

    Let me tell you about multitasking and the proper spelling of misspelling.

    Driving a ship using a sound powered phone rig from the darkness of the Combat Information Center while sitting on a stool, leaning against the mast supervising two sonar console operators as we use sonar to drive in a minefield along a track where we want to remain within 10 yards of plotted movement while using a radio circuit to vector a zodiac with two sailors who are going to mark a mine with a cherry float and anchor at a distance of roughly 100 yards while also listening to MCM tactical, MCM admin and International Air Distress plus Channels 13 and 16 and monitoring position using 2 computer displays (ISS/HYPERFIX) and the paper plotting party on the DRT. It was fun but I was but an amateur! The XO thought he could do all of that and also do paperwork until he got sacked! Of course, I was doing all that multitasking at speeds between 0 and 5 knots while Lex and friends were doing it at Mach 1 so there really wasn’t much comparison. Still, I enjoyed it. Wish I had gotten more than 4 hours sleep a day while doing it. :)

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