【英语生活】一心多用太无礼

I am standing in the kitchen, drinking a glass of wine and waiting for a saucepan of water to boil. I'm staring into the big mirror on the facing wall, where I see a thin, ageing woman also seeking solace in a glass of wine. At the kitchen table, my husband is sitting reading the papers. We are talking, in a desultory kind of way.

Can you believe, he says, that the average UK woman spends two years of her life looking in the mirror? This statistic had been sent to the magazine he edits but he had rejected it on the dual grounds of sexism and implausibility.

I do some mental maths and conclude this is equal to 35 minutes a day. This sounds a lot, though I suggest that, if it included the sort of multitasking mirror-gazing that I was doing just then, it might be fair enough.

Idly, he turns the page of the newspaper.
It's rude, he says, to look at yourself in the mirror while someone is talking to you. No ruder than reading the papers, I reply.

The debate petered out, which was a shame as it touched on an important issue in the debate about multitasking: rudeness. In the rush to declare multitasking either a good thing or a bad thing, this factor often gets lost.

Multitasking was introduced into the language in the late 1990s. It was seized on as the key to success in the new millennium. Five years ago, business magazines were full of breathless articles about chief executives who stayed on top of their schedules by e-mailing while they ran on the treadmill.

The view was that, if multitasking was vital, women would have the edge. From time immemorial, women have been able to breast-feed, bake bread, unload the dishwasher, help with Latin homework and call the
plumber simultaneously. Therefore, in a world in which managing involved multitasking, they would surely win.

But five years later, women haven't won. Multitasking is out and focus is in. Neuroscientists have shown that, when switching between tasks, the brain becomes less efficient and function is lost: mistakes get made and quality suffers. More alarmingly, we are put off multitasking because we look with horror at what it is doing to our children.

Indeed, while my husband and I were arguing about each other's multitasking foibles, upstairs our children were engaged in a sophisticated orgy of multitasking. Facebook, physics homework, iTunes, texting and Ugly Betty were all happening at once.

Two weeks ago there was an article in Time magazine that said anthropologists in LA were sufficiently concerned to have started a four-year study to see what damage this sort of frenetic and perpetual multitasking was doing. However, it'll be a lot longer than four years before we know whether this generation will grow up to be freaks or not (my guess is not). In the meantime we should trust our gut. Mine tells me that multitasking is neither good nor bad per se. It all depends.

Can you multitask while doing homework? As far as I can see, clever and hardworking children get good grades and dumb or lazy ones don't, irrespective of what else they are doing at the same time.

Most of the tasks we do at the same time as doing other things (sending Facebook messages, reading the paper and watching telly and looking in the mirror) use up so little brainpower it is efficient to do two or more at once. This may be neurologically inefficient because the brain has to do a lot of switching, but so what? We are often told that brains are muscles and so isn't exercise good?

Some varieties of multitasking are unambiguously a good thing. Personally, I find knitting and watching the telly excellent as neither is sufficiently satisfying on its own. The same applies to walking and talking.

In the office, there are multitasking activities that clearly complement each other although there are also drawbacks. Eating at your desk is efficient but makes the keyboard messy. Smoking while writing is short-term efficient as it helps you concentrate although less so in the long term, as it kills you. Both eating and smoking can have unfortunate externalities for fellow cubicle dwellers.

Other sorts of multitasking in the office are clearly efficient. When you are on an interminable conference call, it makes sense to catch up with some e-mailing. Ditto a boring meeting is crying out for a BlackBerry to take up the mental slack.

The real problem with these tasks is the same as the one revealed in my kitchen: rudeness. Using a BlackBerry in meetings is rude, as is noisy typing when on the phone.

The most shameless multitasker of all was Bill Clinton. Many of his famous encounters with Monica Lewinsky in his office took place while he was talking to congressmen on the telephone. Probably both tasks were accomplished equally satisfactorily.

But this isn't quite the point: the point is about rudeness. Though who he was being ruder to, the congressman or Monica herself, might be one of the few things about that over-told story we shall never know.

我站在厨房里，喝着一杯葡萄酒，等着锅里的水烧开。我凝视着对面墙上的大镜子，看到一个日渐老去的纤瘦女人也在葡萄酒中寻找着慰藉。我丈夫坐在餐桌旁读着报纸。我们有一搭没一搭地说着话。他说，你相信吗，英国女性一生中平均有两年的时间在照镜子？这个数据发给了他编辑的杂志，但出于性别歧视和难以置信的双重理由，他拒绝予以刊登。

我心算了一下，得出的结论是，这相当于每天35分钟。这听上去很多，不过我认为，如果包括了就像我刚才那样在照镜子的时候还做着其它事的话，这个数据也许相当合理。

他懒散地翻过一页报纸说道，别人跟你说话时照镜子是不礼貌的。我回答道，不比看报纸更不礼貌。

争论平息了，这有些遗憾，因为它触及了多任务(multitasking)争论中的一个重要问题：无礼。在急于宣称同时做多件事是好还是坏时，这个因素常常被人遗忘。

多任务处理这个词于上世纪90年代末进入人们的语言。人们抓住它，将它作为在新千年取得成功的关键。5年前，商业杂志上满是令人喘不过气来的文章，讲述着首席执行官们是如何通过一边在跑步机上运动一边收发电子邮件来从容安排自己的时间表的。

人们曾经认为，如果多任务处理至关重要，那么女性将拥有优势。从远古时代开始，女人们就能够同时完成哺乳、烤面包、洗碗、帮助孩子做拉丁文作业以及打电话叫水管工等多项工作。因此，在管理涉及到多任务处理的世界里，她们必定会取胜。

然而，5年过去了，女性并没有获得胜利。多任务处理过时了，集中精力做事开始流行起来。神经学家们已表明，在多项任务间转换时，大脑会降低效率，功能缺失，于是就会犯错误，质量下降。更令人吃惊的是，我们舍弃多任务处理，是因为我们惊恐地看到它对孩子们造成的影响。

实际上，在我和丈夫就彼此的多任务弱点展开讨论时，我们的孩子正在楼上进行复杂的多任务处理。在Facebook上聊天、做物理作业、听iTunes、发短信和看《丑女贝蒂》(Ugly Betty)，这一切都在同时进行着。

两周前，《时代》(Time)杂志上的一篇文章写道，洛杉矶的人类学家非常担忧，因此展开了一项为期4年的研究，考察这种疯狂而长期的多任务处理将造成何种伤害。然而，要知道这代人长大后是否会成为异类（我猜不会），需要的时间要比4年长得多。同时，我们应相信自己内心的感觉。我的内心感觉告诉我，多任务处理本身既不好也不坏，这要视情况而定。

你可以在做家庭作业的同时做其它事情吗？就我所知，不管同时在做其它什么事情，聪明而勤奋的孩子会得高分，愚笨或懒惰的孩子则不会。

多数我们在做其它事情（在Facebook发信息、读报纸、看电视和照镜子）时做的工作，只需耗费极少的脑力，因此可以同时做两件或更多的事情。这也许会降低神经系统的效率，因为大脑必须做出大量转换，但那又怎样？经常有人告诉我们，大脑是肌肉组成的，那么锻炼不好吗？

某些多任务组合无疑是好事。个人而言，我认为织毛衣和看电视是一个完美的组合，因为单独做任何其中一件事都不足以令人满足。走路和说话也是如此。

在办公室，多任务处理显然可以彼此互补，但也有一些缺点。在办公桌前吃东西可以提高效率，却会把键盘搞糟。写作时吸烟在短时间内有效，因为它能帮助你集中精力，但长期而言则并非如此，因为它会杀了你。吃饭时吸烟会对小空间里的其他人造成不良的外部影响。

办公室里的其它多任务处理显然可以提高效率。在出席冗长的电话会议时，抓紧时间写点电子邮件是合理的。重复枯燥的会议，迫切需要用黑莓(BlackBerry)来弥补精神上的懈怠。

同时处理这些任务的真正问题与在我厨房里发现的一样：无礼。在会议中使用黑莓是不礼貌的，通电话时敲键盘也是如此。

在所有执行多任务处理的人中，最无耻的要属比尔•克林顿(Bill Clinton)。他与莫尼卡•莱温斯基(Monica Lewinsky)著名的办公室绯闻，许多次都发生在他与国会议员通电话时。可能这两项任务的完成同样令人满意。

但这不是问题的关键：关键是无礼。不过，克林顿对谁更无礼，是国会议员还是莫尼卡本人？在这个人们谈烂了的故事中，这或许将成为少数几件我们永远不会知道的事情之一。

译者/梁艳裳