

The Myth of Multitasking - robg
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/article_detail.asp?id=414&css=print

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bryarcanium
If you are interested in time and multitasking, look at some of anthropologist
Edward Hall's stuff.

Monochronism and Polychronism have been co-opted to apply to individuals but
they were coined by Hall to describe patterns of culture. A highly monochronic
culture would be Germany; things happen one at a time, from start to finish,
where a new thing starts. A highly polychronic culture would be a lot of latin
cultures, where whatever is most important that second takes precedence, no
matter when you started it (this is usually determined socially;
family>customer, for example).

Most cultures are more complex than that, though. Japanese business tends to
be highly polychronic in the planning stages, where a consensus must be
reached and all the time in the world is taken to reach it. However, once the
decision has been made, the implementation is not only wicked fast but highly
monochronic.

He's worth looking into if you really want to make the leap from how multi-
tasking affects individuals to how it affects complex systems.

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lvecsey
They conflate a few different issues here, the first is interleaving which is
ok since you don't really suffer a performance loss or mental setback. The
other one is a context switch, for example when a manager interrupts you with
something trivial. Theres nothing more effective at stalling a high speed
pipeline than that.

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scott_s
Can you explain what you mean by interleaving? My intuitive definition ends up
being the same as multitasking.

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cconstantine
I'm guessing the grandparent post is talking about working on multiple (2,
maybe 3) tasks. While waiting for something from one task like a compile/test
run to complete or a response from another developer on a question, you can
work on the other. This allows you to fill empty time with something
productive and lets you context switch at favorable times.

That kind of soft context switch is fairly easy to manage. A task coming and
forcing a context switch in the middle of something incurs a much higher
penalty.

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scott_s
Still sounds like plain 'ol multitasking to me, as does the other reply.

~~~
fallentimes
But with multitasking you're working on something at the direct cost of
working on something else and indirect cost of time lost switching context.
With this, you work on things while other items are being autoworked on (e.g.
running a test or a crawl, downloading a file).

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carruthk
Multitasking is a pernicious evil of our times! Also the cost of context
switching (especially for developers) can be hours per day.

