A father and his daughter are
talking at home. The daughter is attending the Time Management course at NILS.
Daughter: Are you having breakfast now?
Father: Yes, why?
Daughter: You cannot have it on the sofa. Come to the table.
Father: Why?
Daughter: I need to do an experiment. Please come here and sit at the
table.
(The father looks worried, but moves over to the table.)
Daughter: Have you already read the newspaper?
Father: No. Why?
Daughter: You have to read it while eating your breakfast.
Father: Alright. Give me the paper.
(The daughter hands over the paper and switches on the TV to a news
channel. She keeps the channel muted.)
Daughter: You are to read the sports news from the paper and follow the
general news on TV.
Father: Simultaneously?
Daughter: Yes and keep eating your breakfast.
Father: What is going on?
Daughter: I am doing an experiment on Multitasking. It is in our
syllabus.
Father: Multitasking is a common thing. What can you possibly learn in a
course about it?
Daughter: We have learned how to optimize Multitasking. The trick is to
use different processing parts of the brain simultaneously instead of
overloading the same part. Which means you cannot do many similar tasks at the
same time, but you can do many fundamentally different tasks.
Father: What types of different tasks?
Daughter: I have chosen five such tasks. First, eating. For that you are
having breakfast. Second, reading. For that I have given you the newspaper.
Third, observing. For that I have switched on the TV in mute.
Father: What are the other two?
Daughter: Listening and speaking. Now I will sit down and tell you a
story about my friend. You have to listen to me and comment on it. But you
cannot stop reading the paper or following the news.
Father: I am supposed to read a paper, watch news headlines, listen to
your stories and comment on them? Am I mad?
Daughter: And eat breakfast. That’s it. This should be fairly easy. All
are happening in different parts of the brain. Shall we start?
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