Multi-tasking is the killer, literally.

Einstein once said that if you can drive a car while kissing a beautiful girl then you are not giving the kiss the attention that it deserves.

Multi-tasking is the new buzzword.

It started with the dual-core Intel processors which could do two tasks at the same time. Mind you, they needed separate processors. Then you moved to quad-core and eight-core.

We only have one.

And when we multi-task, we overload this processor, which can still do only one thing at a time.

Let’s take a non-digital analogy for this. Let’s say you are washing the dishes in the kitchen while brushing your teeth in the bathroom. Sounds crazy, right. Precisely.

You are in the bathroom, you turn the tap on. Then you go to the kitchen and turn that tap on. Then back to bathroom and picking up the toothbrush to put paste on it. No, notification from the kitchen, Tap is running. You rush back to put the vim on the scrubber. Oh god. another notification, the tap in the bathroom is still running. You rush back, put the toothbrush in your mouth, rush back and pick up a plate to wash…

… You get the idea.

This is exactly what we do when we multi-task on our devices. There are different physical locations for each task, and a particular set of neurons start activating when we pick up one. When we switch, the other set starts lighting up, then we switch back again, and so on.

You can see the craziness of running from the bathroom to the kitchen and back. That’s the craziness that we push on our brain on a consistent basis.

No wonder we neither get the dishes done nor brush our teeth, but yeah, we are very busy and very tired.