LAST WEEK I stumbled upon the most shocking piece of self-revelation. I’m normally too busy and shallow for this sort of introspection, but this one slapped me in the face so I had to take notice.
I was looking for my voter registration card. Actually, I wasn’t just looking, I was ransacking the house trying to find the stupid thing. I wanted it as backup on election day. I couldn’t stand the thought of being deprived my right to vote if I couldn’t produce it. And for the record, I never vote for, I vote against, to quote W.C. Fields.
What really got my goat was that I’d delilerately put the card in a safe place but couldn’t remember which safe place.
It’s bad enough to lose something important, but to lose it after making a special effort not to, well, this is a recipe for frustration and some fairly fruity language.
And this leads me to the shocking piece of self-revelation: I am actually a highly organized individual. The problem is that I appear to be a highly organized individual trapped in the body of a scatterbrain.
At my very core, I like order. When confronted by important bits of paper that arrive in the mail or from school, my organized inner self will always guide me to file them away in a coveted safe place.
My organized inner self has gone so far as to create a proper filing system, fully alphabetized and complete with a things-to-be-filed basket on top. This organized self even has designated special shelves and drawers for certain things.
For example, there is one drawer dedicated exclusively to the storage of vitamin bottles. That would be the organized inner self at work. But the scatterbrain conspires against this organizational inner self by causing me to forget to take the silly vitamins!
Likewise the alphabetized filing system. The organized inner self tells me to file things immediately and alphabetically. And I do. But the scatterbrain can’t remember into which slot I put the important item.
It’s like a civil war going on in my head. The two sides are constantly sniping and barking. "Don’t be so neurotic!" shouts the scatterbrain. "Don’t be such an airhead," retorts the organized inner self.
And there I am in the middle of this mess just trying to exercise my democratic right to vote. What gives? How can an organized person manage to lose things so predictably?
The answer arrived a few days after the voter registration card incident. It was a newspaper article that questioned the wisdom of multi-tasking. According to Wallace Immen in the Globe and Mail, people who do more than one thing at a time are less productive at work.
Immen quotes a study by Hewlett-Packard that suggested workers who check e-mail while doing something else suffer a temporary IQ drop of five to 15 per cent. Apparently, multi-tasking is bad for concentration and mental ability. Multi-tasking, in other words, is the enemy of the organized inner self.
So, if you’re filing your voter registration card at the same time as you’re feeding cats, wiping a dollop of ketchup off your shirt, ordering a kid to brush her teeth again, answering the phone, folding the laundry and listening to the 5 o’clock news, OK, point taken.
As my six-year-old Thing 2 says, Focus, Dude!
(glethbridge@herald.ca)
2 comments:
The card could be with your remote which could be near the full bourbon bottles....
Does this multi-tasking thing mean that if a Yard Ape is on MSN, "talking" and on the phone, "talking" and completing an economics assignment, all the while eating an everything bagel (they never admit to having food at the computer) that his IQ has dropped, say 15-20 percent? I was hoping the jury was still out on this one,that the studies were still incomplete. It's going to be a sad day when all these 16-year olds join the workforce if this is the case!
Correction, should have said 5-15 percent, still too much...
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