The great plate spinner!

I'm an NPR junkie and today they were talking about multi-tasking and how the human brain actually processes information (or as they believe). There was a study at the University of Michigan where they took volunteers and put them into an MRI (or CAT scan - I can't remember now) to watch the brain activity as they switched gears quickly. Such as the subject had to tell which number was bigger and then which one was which color, but respond quickly.

The neurologist who they were interviewing (also, no reference), mentioned that humans aren't as good at multi-tasking as we think we are (he even mentioned how delusional, literally, the human brain is into tricking itself into thinking it's processing quickly). Such as a task of looking for three friends at a crowded event. The ability to find one friend wearing a red scarf on one corner, another friend wearing a green scarf in the middle of the crowd and the third friend wearing a blue scarf across the street simultaneously. The brain has to literally switch gears to process what it's looking for before moving onto the next task so as you're scanning for the blue scarf, you could look right past the red scarf and completely miss it. He mentioned that our brains' executive center (located behind our eyes in the frontal lobe) can really only do one, possibly two tasks at a time.

Like how hard it is to talk on the phone and write an email. Both tasks use the same vocal/vocabulary sectors of our brains and it's nearly impossible to do it. What the doctor believed was that we "think" we're doing multiple things at once, but in reality we're only doing several tasks at maybe 10%.

So when you're driving the car, talking on the cell phone and putting on make-up in the car, you're really not doing anything well. I know that sounds like common sense, but in the middle of trying to do it, we subconsciously think we're doing all three really, really well. The fact of the matter is that we're putting our brains under so much stress that we loose so much of our actual ability to function. Hence accidents, mistakes at work, etc.

I was thinking about how this applies to my own work - so much of my job is trying to keep the plates spinning in the air. I also liken my job to the analogy that all things are on "fire" and I really only respond to that which is burning the brightest. Kind of like only really attending to which plate is imminently going to fall.

It leaves an immense amount of stress in a given day and me completely susceptible to "crashes" when I get blindsided by events that I didn't see coming. I think that with experience, I could recognize those pitfalls before they are actually stepped into, but for the time being, it's an incredibly stressful way to go about a job. Some days it actually feels better to just watch it all burn and not give a damn.

I also realize that I'm really not that good of a "fire fighter". It's not that I can't think effectively under pressure, but I find that most of the issues I deal with at work are those that I've tabled when I was dealing with the other "fires". It's tiresome to hop between who's yelling at you the loudest since you're always walking into a negative situation (there are very, very few kudos in my line of work - perfection is expected and demanded and anything less is failure).

I think why I enjoyed college so much was that expectations and delivery of performance were clearly spelled out and very few things actually caught you off guard. It's not that you didn't work hard or spent a lot of time doing it, but that I knew that getting the job done would take "X". Even if it was in a subject I didn't have much experience in. And, that by all things wonderful, the work cycle would come to a conclusion and a new cycle would begin (plus you could always get a college credit for stupid classes like golf and ballroom dancing to break up the day).

The professional world is a 35 year perpetual, single cycle term where expectations and reality are rarely close (or even on the same planet). When I worked in architecture, we used to joke (internally, never with a client - god forbid that the guy with the money would go somewhere else): You can have two of these choices, but not all three:

1. You can have it fast
2. You can have it cheap
3. You can have it correct

When a client would (and does) demand all three, and my bosses would be stupid enough to do it, the stress was incredible. Far too many plates to spin in to short of time coupled with lack of experience and you've got a recipe for disaster.

I know that my own realities of any career involve a level of perpetuity and exposure to the blind-sides that happen. I guess I strive for some level of consistency and where expectations and reality are somewhat in the same proximity. Maybe that is also riding around on the unicorn with my "quality of work, workplace and compensation". Who knows. I'm just trying to stay positive and not let the cloud of cynicism rain on too much of my day.