Multi-tasking

I am intimidated by the number of tasks in front of me. Literally: the Microsoft Windows task bar stares me in the face with so many of them that, even though I've doubled its on-screen space, it has to collapse all the email tasks into one before everything will fit. And that's only since the last crash - there were more before that.

How does this happen? I don't have any client work at the moment, so surely I have time to stay on top of everything. Surely.

Before the Information Age, I think people only expected to do only one thing at a time. They had to; they had no computers to hold the state of each task. OK, ok, so they had paper, and multiple burners on the stove. But a stove only has so many burners, and how many novels or memos do people have on the go at once when each one takes setup time to get the paper in front of you and start writing, or feed the paper into the typewriter?

Nowadays, task-switching just takes a mouse click. I don't have to click the mouse; I can just keep working on my current task until it's done. But it doesn't take much of a stray thought before I'm off to something else.

Barbara Sher writes in one of her books that "clutter is the hallmark of the creative person" (or something like that). Each thing left out represents a creative project in some stage: perhaps a piece of styrofoam that looks like it could be turned into some interesting art, or a screenplay in progress. Paper can be put in a filing cabinet or on a shelf - but we all know what "on the shelf" means. Anything put away is in grave danger of not getting done. No wonder the room I'm in is a mass of paper, never mind the computer. At least the magazines to be read, and the tasks on the computer, are still to-dos in my mind; not so all the emails I haven't replied to, because there are so many of them that older ones fade into obscurity.

I guess I need to get a grip on which tasks I'm actually going to do. But it's so much easier to just play Solitaire - which Microsoft has thoughtfully included in every copy of Windows.