Driving Down the Multi-Task Highway

Everybody's doing it.

Picking their phone and talkin' it.

While they're driving.

What's up with that?  It's almost a gut instinct.  I see people on their phones while they're driving ALL the time.  I almost see more people talking on them than I see people without them.

I have a number of people who talk to me on the phone while they're driving.  And when they get to their destination they say, "Well, I'm at so-and-so's now.  Goodbye!"  What?  I'm filler while you're driving?  Driving's not enough?  You have to be doing something else too?

But the desire to multi-task and get more out of your drive time doesn't stop there.  There's meals consumed, putting on makeup, audio books, rocking it out to the radio or your tunes.  Some vehicles even have built-in DVD players. Even there are people (gulp) texting.

Culturally, mentally, we can't seem to accept that driving in and of itself is enough to do.  We have to have our minds working at two things at once.  I know all the risks these behaviors entail, but we just can't seem to help ourselves. Maybe our cars are too easy to drive now, maybe the pressures of the new, busy age will not allow us to do only one thing at a time.

Multi-tasking effects other areas of our lives as well.  Want to watch TV?  Do it, but be doing household chores, or while you're on the ipad or cell.  Want to read?  Listen to an audio book instead that will allow you to move around and do other things while you're being told a wonderful story.

Even at work,our minds are running in several directions at once.  We're supposed to write down how much time we spend on each client, but it becomes almost impossible to tell as we wildly careen between one client and crisis and another.

I'm a fairly lazy person.  So I probably spend more time concentrating on one task to the exclusion of others.  I'm not always happy having my mind divided between several tasks.

But I must confess.  I have used the phone while driving.  It's primarily to tell Alison I'm on my way home from work or theater.  And even worse, I have texted at stop lights before.  So maybe our cultural disease of multi-tasking is finally, slowly, starting to effect me.

Yes!!! Just won at Trivie again while writing this!  Who da man?