I'm practicing multi-tasking as we speak (as I write), and indeed the whole topic of "multi-tasking" has been much on my mind, apropos of this presentation by a British Sikh, Sukhi Wahiwala. What people have learned from near death is a genre on Youtube that I've been data mining lately, I wonder why.
Sukhi's focusing technique reminds me of Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, a course I took in the Philippines and have continued to acknowledge, especially on math-teach (now closed to new postings, as of the end of 2017). The practice of closing the book you're reading, getting out a piece of paper, and actually doing a "recall", or "mind map" if you will (more boxes and arrows maybe), some kind of "diagram" is pretty helpful. You do some intentional dot connecting before turning your attention to something else.
In Python World, we're much obsessed with age old scheduling challenges characteristic of the Operating System itself. "What does an OS really do?" people wonder. It multi-tasks. In practice that means matching hardware resources to work waiting to be done (queued), efficiently (optimally)... or so we hope. Writing schedulers in software is not easy and I'm not the expert. I admire from afar. But then we each have our own multi-threaded lives to contend with, and that supreme Bottle Neck in Chief we picture inside our own heads (the homunculus).
We may get the impression in early training that time management skills get mastered early on, as a prelude to becoming an adult. As an adult in a later chapter (turning 60 this year), I'd say we're always spiraling through the perennial challenges of even breathing properly. A lot of Hinduism seems caught up with breath. Yoga etc. Why not? Food too. In English we have a fair (unfair?) amount of semantic distance between "food" and "medicine", but not so much between "cooking" and "chemistry". The pharmacist used to be a chemist (Linus Pauling's dad). A cook's kitchen may look a lot like a chem lab, which it literally is. Alchemist's too.
A theme in these blogs is revisiting how we teach "home economics" e.g. cooking, in early schooling. Or do we?
Anyway, thanks for the phone call Dr. Tag, and now I must go catch that bus. I'm heading downtown to the Process Work Institute to register late for a course, which will cost me two more beers. The course itself is like twenty five beers.
