Wed, 06 Jun 2007

Multitasking . . . NAH . . . Interrupt-Driven

OK, so this isn't really a "What are You?" topic, but I have been thinking about my work life a lot recently. This is probably because I have been working a good deal of overtime recently. So, if someone were to ask me "what are you?" last week, say, I might have answered "interrupt-driven". Either that or, "over worked and under paid."

Do you every worry about multitasking. That is you worry that you won't have to do two or more things at once. I don't have that problem. I can only do one thing at a time -- most of us really do that. So the situation is that we need to switch between many things very quickly.

My work life is interrupt-driven. I get started on something and something else comes along which demands my attention. So I switch to that when something else comes along . . . well, you get the picture. I'm actually pretty good at it. I can existing in this chaos even though I really don't enjoy it much. The key is to be able to pick up on something quickly, stop it, start something else quickly, stop that, and finally be able to complete the things that were interrupted. The key is not to be able to do more than one thing at a time, but to be able to sustain the interrupted thing while attending to the interruption and then resume the original thing, sometime with a minimum of start up time.

I guess because I can do this through several interruptions, you might say that I'm interrupt-driven.

posted 19:18 [/WhatAreYou] permanent link