Multitasking: many tasks at once, so it *seems* like things are getting done faster.

Timeslicing: a way of implementing multistasking by working on many tasks at once by chopping and changing between them.

Basically, the CPU (or you for that matter) can’t do any more work than you already do, you just allocate your time in a more prioritized manner.

However, there is a downside (called “context switching” if you want to look it up on wikipedia or something). Each time you switch tasks costs you some “switching time” which _is_ _not_ _productive_. So if you’re multitasking 5 tasks you’ll lose time whenever you switch.

At the end – when all tasks are done – you’ll actually have taken longer to complete all 5 than if you’d just done them one after the other due to the lost context switching.

The more context switches the more time lost.

If you’re not careful you end up spending more time swapping from one task to another than any real work (This is usually what your PC is doing when it hangs BTW – if you have 5 programs up and running for each of your tasks, it wastes a lot of time just swapping from one to the other. The same thing can happen to humans)

The management crowd might think that ‘multitasking’ means ‘you get more done’, but what it really means is ‘high priority work gets done first, at the cost of low priority work which gets delayed’ and _overall_ productivity is lower.

Funny really, I always thought it was management’s task to efficiently allocate resources and tasks – not the workers.

Multitasking == abdication of responsiblity

Been thinking along this line with twitter, weighing what I am or am not getting from it against the distraction it creates in doing a proper job of coming here to read your stuff and offer my meager comments.