[CrankyPants]

"You can multitask? Fine. Then read a book and write one at the same time." -David Weinberger, 1999

Obviously (the excellent) William James predates this by some time, but within the context of the modern era, this sort of thing has been discussed long before the Hallowells and Ferrisses of the world made their careers by repackaging old notions.

[chris_mahan]

I explain it like this. From downtown Los Angeles, drive to Las Vegas (5 hours) and San Diego (2 hours).

But in 30 minute increments: 30 minutes heading toward Las Vegas, then 30 minute heading toward San Diego.

[CrankyPants]

I like that, though they'd need a Humvee.

[chris_mahan]

They'll run out of gas and be in the middle of nowhere. (Kind of like what happens when you multitask as a software developer)

[blumkvist]

You can read a book and listen to music and get a good understanding of the book and know the lyrics at the same time. It requires a lot of practice and dedication, but it can be done. It's one of the underlying methods to teach yourself rapid reading.

Multitasking is not just switching between tasks. It requires tremendous effort and time to achieve it, but it can be done.

[CrankyPants]

That's interesting, I'd like to know more about that.

There are certainly areas where some level of multitasking can be trained. For some, it's still merely fast switching, and for the gifted few, there's the capacity to become so familiar, competent, and therefore at ease with complex tasks that they become second nature, and that frees up bandwidth for other things.

The problem gets to be that that sort of thing is very challenging, and most people just aren't capable of doing it well, if at all. The level of self-deception surrounding the issue is stratospheric. (We're talking about maybe ~5% of the population.) And, for the most part, it only makes sense to practice in high-workload environments where there may not be the ability to add people to divide the workload (think: some aviation).