{"id":298,"date":"2009-09-09T20:35:55","date_gmt":"2009-09-09T20:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/09\/09\/on_multitasking\/"},"modified":"2009-09-09T20:35:55","modified_gmt":"2009-09-09T20:35:55","slug":"on_multitasking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/09\/09\/on_multitasking\/","title":{"rendered":"On multitasking"},"content":{"rendered":"

The old joke goes that while mothers know their children’s birthdays, shoe sizes, favourite sweets, least favourite foods and names of their best friends; and their best friends’ birthdays, shoe sizes, favourite sweets, least favourite foods and their<\/em> best friends, fathers are vaguely aware there are small creatures in the house.<\/p>\n

\nSimilarly, women are supposedly able to walk, read a newspaper, send text messages and help old ladies across the street while simultaneously reciting their children’s birthdays, shoe sizes, favourite sweets, least favourite foods and names of their best friends. On the other hand, men can just about manage to chew gum without falling over.<\/p>\n

\n\"Rugby<\/a>
\n‘I’m concentrating on breathing’<\/em><\/p>\n

\nDefinitely a sexism thing going on there: women can multitask; men can’t. I guess it’s fair enough, given that misogyny is endemic in our culture. But, you see, it’s actually a well-kept secret. As a man, I can say that we can do things like put up shelves, look after the baby and cook dinner all the while<\/em> listening to the cricket. Truth is, we’d much rather sit and watch the cricket and pretend that we’re stretching our limited resources by knowing exactly how much beer remains in the fridge (just don’t ask us to explain LBW, OK?). We find life a lot easier if we keep people’s expectations low.<\/p>\n

\nAnyway, Jenny twittered today about multitasking<\/a>. And while I am keen to find out what exactly was going on in her UCL empire, I am also reminded of something that happened to me when I went to work for a little company you’ve probably never even heard of<\/a> (unless you read this blog).<\/p>\n

\nI realized pretty early on in my graduate career that I couldn’t afford to do just one thing at a time. If I wanted G-actin (prepared from rabbit muscle) purified and labelled and polymerization-competent during the same timeframe that the protein I had to purify from buckets of chicken gizzards (five day prep, ammonium sulphate extraction followed by four columns, all in the coldroom) was going to be stable, I had to do things simultaneously. Especially if I also wanted to make competent cells so that I could clone and express the domain that I was also trying to crystallize before my stipend ran out. <\/p>\n

\nMultitasking seemed pretty normal to me, as well as sensible. My first post-doc was the same: cloning, expressing, growing cells and chopping off the fingers of students who didn’t know how to use computers all had to happen at the same time if the papers were to be published.<\/p>\n

\nIt was quite the shock when I got to the company, and was told very early on that I could only work on one project at a time, and shouldn’t interleave experiments. Because, the story went, all the projects would then suffer.<\/p>\n

\nI never did understand that. I did, actually, rather well at that company, getting two projects (the first minor, the second pretty major) to launch and realizing the third was utterly doomed, in three years. So well, that when I stormed out they hired two people to replace me and still spiralled into the ground a year or two later.<\/p>\n

\nWhen I went back to academia I was straight back into multitasking mode: at any one time I’d be trying to crystallize (or solve by NMR) five different proteins (the chances of any one protein crystallizing are around 10%. But you never know which 10% it’s going to be in advance, and you can never tell when a sodding high throughput structosomic project is going to gazump you. Cock<\/em>) as well as growing cells and doing nuclear import assays, teaching students how not to poison themselves or anyone else, helping out other members of the lab and running secret projects on the side.<\/p>\n

\nIt’s the same in my new job, too. I don’t feel happy<\/em> unless I’m juggling too many eggs. Not only do I find that I finish multiple tasks ahead of the combined schedule, I also get bored<\/em> if I have to stick to one thing and one thing only.<\/p>\n

\nSo maybe being limited to one project does work for normal people. But for the type of person who likes science? Well, I don’t claim to be normative, and I’d love to hear about your experience. As for me, I go stir crazy if I only have one thing to do.<\/p>\n

\nBut don’t ask me to mow the lawn when I’m watching the cricket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The old joke goes that while mothers know their children’s birthdays, shoe sizes, favourite sweets, least favourite foods and names of their best friends; and their best friends’ birthdays, shoe sizes, favourite sweets, least favourite foods and their best friends, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}