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> I can be in a meeting or talking to someone, feel my watch buzz and check to see if I need to respond to a message without pulling my phone out. You don't ne
by zeveb 10y ago
> I can be in a meeting or talking to someone, feel my watch buzz and check to see if I need to respond to a message without pulling my phone out.
You don't need to check your smart watch or pull out your phone to know whether you should respond to a message when in a meeting or talking to someone: the answer is that you shouldn't. You owe your attention to the others in the meeting or the other to whom you are talking.
If there is something higher-priority going on (e.g. your kid is in the hospital), then you shouldn't be in that meeting or talking to that person: you should be attending to that higher-priority circumstance.
It's a bit like GTD or project management: prioritise the calls on your time, and spend your time on the highest-priority. Don't try to multi-task; it works no better for paying attention to meetings or conversations than it does for writing code.
- nl 10y agoThis just isn't always the case. My job is multitasking, and I'm good at it. I'm not rude, and nor am I distracted. But there are always multiple high priority things going on, and my job isn't to give one of them 100% attention, it is to make sure they are all done.
- zeveb 10y ago> My job is multitasking, and I'm good at it. I'm sure that you think that you are, but I don't believe we're nearly as good at multitasking as we believe we are; indeed, I think that's a truth cognitive science has been exploring for some time now. The time it takes to context-switch from listening mode to watch- or phone-checking mode and then back into listening mode is longer than we subjectively realise, and long enough to miss important information.
- jrockway 10y agoI'm on call during work hours, and I also work on other projects while on call. Production outages preempt future planning, that's just the way things go. If someone was in the hospital, that would preempt both production outages and future planning ;) I agree with the other poster that says "my job is multitasking". Very few people have the liberty of doing only one thing at a time.