Multitasking

Multitasking. Men are supposedly no good at it, women supposedly shine. Multitasking is also generally considered to be A Good Thing. Quite how this then sits with having a short attention  span, which sometimes surely amounts to the same thing, being A Bad Thing, I know not. If I sit on the sofa (as I might well do) listening to music, knitting, reading a cookery book, and mentally going through my kitchen cupboards to check baking supplies, is that multitasking or the result of a short attention span or information overload? Do I do any of those things properly?

In some ways I think I do. The cookery book  I've looked at many times before and I don’t need to really take any of it in or read it in any way attentively or critically. Hopefully some of the recipes will be in my shorter term memory when I need to bake cakes on Thursday and ideas of what to bake will come to the fore. Some of the thoughts on cupboard stocks did later motivate a proper check of cupboards, and items being added to my shopping list. The knitting was fine – it’s still at the knit 2 purl 2 stage with no thinking required at all. Knitting in this way is often a secondary or additional activity. 

What about the listening to music? I was intending to say how hopeless this is – how the music becomes background wallpaper and I don’t take it in other than to become aware of it mid-tune – or, more often, as a tune ends – suddenly recognising that it’s one I particularly like and particularly wanted to hear (I do the same with the weather forecast: I switch off at the moment John Humphrys says “and now here is Philip Avery with the weather” and switch on again with the magic words “And that’s your forecast”). I was going to say that you need to listen to music as a single activity to really listen, really hear. And yet, I woke up this morning with several tunes on the CD going round my head, fully recognisable and accurate. So somehow they did sink in, despite (or because of?) my mind being elsewhere.

But when I am playing multitasking, or letting my mind wander, does not help. The point at which I lose track of what comes next, how many times I've played the B part, or even whether I'm on the B part or the A part, is the point at which I realise I am thinking about dinner or work or knitting or something I need to mention to the fan or that pile of ironing I forgot to do (again). I'm so used to doing one (or two, or three) things and thinking about something different. I need to learn that with music, with playing music, it’s different. I need to stop multitasking and concentrate on what I am doing.

Then I play this evening and feel that just pumping the bellows, keeping up even pressure on the bag and playing a tune correctly is more multitasking than I'm up to. Started and finished with the Eagle's Whistle, which I love to play and which does feel very different from tunes I learnt from dots. Worked on Delvinside and the Dragon, but not with any great result. Struggled to play through half a dozen of the usual suspects, got cross and gave up.