The Task at Hands

Ralph Keyes was on the phone the other day with a friend, assuming that she was interested in what he was saying. Then, he heard the repulsive sound of envelopes ripping in the background.

“I realized she was looking at her mail. She started asking me to repeat everything. I got upset and started reaming her out,” said Keyes, the author of “Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It” (Harper Collins, 1991). “But then I realized that this is modern life, and modern life means doing several things at once.”

Call it multi-tasking, the individual mocking the machinery of modernity, and, let’s face it, you do it. In fact, admit it, you’re probably doing it right now. Is the TV on while you’re reading this? Is it propped up on your Lifecycle while you listen to your Walkman? Are you microwaving your coffee and shushing the kids, who are themselves watching the tube while crayoning a card for Grandma who, by the way, has just entered her phone number on your pulsing beeper?

Life is fast and there is so much to do. For example, does anyone merely drive anymore? There are cigarette lighters and ashtrays so we can smoke, chew or dispose litter-lessly while we steer. Radios, tape players and now CD players have become standard, and many of us only listen to music as a drive-distractor. The auto industry gives design awards for cup holders, so we can properly slurp while we swerve. Nearly 40 million Americans now have cell phones, and the car fax is becoming de rigueur for roving business types.

And now, a Lockeford, Calif., concern named ACT Co. is pushing a device called Auto Desk, a plastic stand that attaches to a steering wheel and supports a laptop computer in the “ergonomically correct” angle.

But wait! Auto Desk may quickly become obsolete. In Palo Alto, Daimler-Benz’s research group is working on dashboard Internet access on the Mercedes E420 prototype. The plan is to have the computer voice-activated, so one may have to put the car phone on hold and put the burger aside before simul-driving on the freeway and the Infobahn.

After all, good consumers are perfectly capable of doing it all, three or four things at a time. Ask Alan Seidner, who runs Seidner & Co., an investment managing firm in Pasadena. Seidner’s favorite office machine is the “Bloomberg box,” a product of the Bloomberg financial services group. The box is a type of closed-circuit TV whose screen is multiplexed, jig-saw-puzzle style, into half a dozen fragments. In the upper right is the live Bloomberg TV network of financial and world news. Below that is an ongoing ticker with worldwide stock, bond and currency prices. Along the left side are separate blocks of graphics and type with rolling cultural news, national weather forecasts, commodities prices and sports scores.

“People involved with trading of securities are generally on the top of the food chain of knowledge and general abilities,” Seidner said. “You have to have very good comprehension skills to look at all parts of a Bloomberg screen. . . . I think I can see and comprehend and do a lot of things at once. At home, I love to surf with my TV remote. You have to be able to do this to be productive these days.”

Words to live by, indeed. “Time has become a commodity and one wants to get the most out of our commodities. One of the ways to do this is to do multiple activities, but there are clear downsides,” said Geoffrey Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at Penn State University.

Godbey is the co-author, with John Robinson, of “Time for Life” (Penn State University Press), a new book whose most shocking finding is that people today actually have more leisure time than their parents did. According to the authors’ studies, men have 40.4 hours of leisure time a week, five hours more than in 1965, while women have 38.9 hours a week, six more than in the 1960s. What is different is that folks today are trying to pack more things into the 24-hour day (unchanged, last we checked).

“We are a privileged society. We have a million things that we could be doing and have the opportunity to do almost all of them,” Godbey said. “We are not constrained as people were in the past. Should we sail a boat or ride a horse? Do both! Play tennis or drink beer? Do both!

“Over the last 30 years, we have fought hard to downplay ascribed statuses. We don’t want to be black or white, short or tall, rich or poor,” he reflected. “What matters now is what you do. You are the sum total of your actions. Not to do anything is not to become anything. So we do--more and more and more, so some of it has to be done simultaneously.”

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If one were to try to pinpoint the beginning of the Multi-Tasking Era, it would probably be when the first baby boom teenager successfully did his or her homework while switching between three TV sitcoms.

“Since TV enables you to watch more than one program at a time, you could argue that daily life for more and more of us has come to resemble that kind of multiplicious spectacle,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins University.

“The troubling thing about this experience is it necessarily creates a dependency on a certain level of stimulation and on a certain quickness. You feel anxious if you are not distracted,” he said. “I can’t tell you how I feel oppressed by having CNN in every airport lounge. You go to Jiffy Lube or the hospital emergency room and a TV is always on. It has helped to make people less capable of sitting by themselves and reading or doing just one thing. Silence is restorative. It allows you to collect your wits. But the stimuli don’t let you have wits.”

Some implications of this are unexpected. “Timelock” author Keyes credits TV channel surfing for checking the rise of soccer in the United States. “I’m a sinner in all of this too. I hate to watch TV without doing something else,” Keyes said. “Baseball and football on TV are ideal. You get used to when you have to look up. We’ve become soccer fans in my household, but it’s hard for a modern person to watch on TV. You do something else and the only goal of the game is liable to be scored.”

Having only one eye on the tube has an insidious effect, said Watts Wacker, a futurist at the Stanford Research Institute. “Studies have shown that TV may be the only thing that as people do more of it, they become more dissatisfied with it, but the dissatisfaction doesn’t keep us from doing more of it,” he said. “So we just layer things on it. That way, we can justify our contradictory feelings about it.”

Penn State researcher Godbey blames multi-tasking, in part, for an upsurge in obesity and the widespread use of pornography. “We do a million things while we eat and we eat faster and don’t taste anything, so we eat more,” he said. “Pornography, that’s quick too. There’s not even enough time to make love for some people. They might miss something else.”

In essence, that is the problem. People get competitive about their aplomb in doing seven things simultaneously. Godbey recalled a recent get-together of academic friends. One said he was just back from South America. Another told of his recent trip to Taiwan. A third said, “Oh, only your first time there?” With such experiential bidding wars, it’s no wonder someone tries to triple up on mundane activities.

“One of the major American push points is that we feel we will miss something--anything,” Wacker said. “You don’t want to say you were the only one to miss the O.J. car chase. So we multi-task. And then with that extra time, we multi-task some more. It is sort of an insurance policy.”

Deep down, against death maybe?

“The problem of multi-tasking is, in some way, related to death,” said Dr. Stephan Rechtshaffen, president of the Omega Institute, a research and seminar facility in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and author of “TimeShifting: Creating More Time to Enjoy Your Life” (Doubleday, 1996). “When you look at most past, even some present cultures, like the Hopi and people in Bali, they live in circular time. With a firm belief in rebirth, you don’t worry about what you don’t get done this time around.”

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Rechtshaffen is among those not merely deploring the contemporary sense of time management; he tries to help people fight multi-tasking through his workshops. Those who attend learn to focus on the present, no simple thing.

“I ask people in class, ‘What does it feel like to sit on a couch with nothing to do?’ People feel guilty or anxious because they aren’t doing anything. I work with people on their breathing. When it is stressed, it is shallow and rapid. I have them slow everything down. I’m really in favor of the non-cigarette cigarette break. We are a society which has an epidemic of anxiety,” he said. “We worry about how much we can get done before we die. So we live with great stress and anxiety about not getting things done, even as we do more and more at once.”

And here’s the grim kicker: Done this way, little of anything is conducted as well as it could be.

“I think part of being an American is doing things well enough,” Keyes said. “Our big contribution to home building, for instance, is the balloon frame house, which is a house that is good enough. It will last enough time and we will move in a couple of years anyhow. In Europe, houses stand for centuries. The jack of all trades and master of none, that is an entirely American concept.”

But it is not all despair for the epidemic of anxious multi-tasking. Wacker said there is a chance our brains will evolve to cope with the advancing pace and volume of stimuli. Yes, it’s just possible that that first kid who did algebra while “Leave It to Beaver” whined on the tube has set the course for a brain-expanding future.