Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

I was contacted by the folks at MONyog and asked if I would review MONyog. Since using MONyog is something I have been wanting to do for a while, I jumped at the chance. Of course, “jumped” is relative; Rohit asked me at the MySQL User Conference back in April, and here it […]

A couple of years ago, I read Joel Spolsky’s article “Human Task Switches Considered Harmful,” and it resonated mightily. The key take-away from that article is this: Never let people work on more than one thing at once. Amen. The nice thing about Joel’s article is that it explains why in a very compelling way.

Last week, a good friend emailed me a link to an article by Christine Rosen called “The Myth of Multitasking,” which goes even further. It quotes one group of researchers at the University of California at Irvine, who found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task.

So it’s not just me.

The “benefits” of human multitasking is an illusion. Looking or feeling busy is no substitute for accomplishment.

Here’s a passage from the Rosen article that might get your attention, if I haven’t already:

…Research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.

Translation: Trying too hard to do the information overload thing makes you sick, and it makes you stupid.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated the times I’ve been “forced” to multitask, and I’ve loved those segments of my life when I’ve been free to lock down on a train of thought for hours at a time. I believe deep down that multitasking is bad—at least for me—and literature like the two articles I’ve discussed here supports that feeling in a compelling way.

Here’s a checklist of decisions that I resolve to implement myself:

• When you need to sit down and write, whether it’s code or text, close your door, and turn off your phone and your email. (Or just work the 10pm-to-4am shift like I did with Optimizing Oracle Performance.)
• When you’re in a classroom, if you’re really trying to learn something, turn off your email and your browser.
• When you’re managing someone, make sure he’s working on one thing at a time. It’s obviously important that this one thing should be the right thing to be working on. But it’s actually worse to be working on two things than working on just one wrong thing. Read Spolsky. You’ll see.

As discussed in Part IV, index blocks that contain nothing but deleted index entries are placed on the index freelist and can be recycled in subsequent index block split operations. This of course is a good thing as it helps to keep the index as small and efficient as possible without having to perform relatively expensive […]

Sometime I see a developer try to run something like “select deptno,sal from emp group by deptno”. I usually ask the developer “But employees in the department have many different salaries. Which one do you want?”, and sometimes I get an amazing answer: “I don’t really care, I just want to see any random salary”. […]