Focus

I can become very focused on things, individual things.   I can sometimes get so focused on a problem that I really can’t think about anything else.   Some problems will consume every bit of my brain power and I can’t do anything except try to solve it.   This is not really good for me.   I’m supposed to be able to multitask.   I’m supposed to be able to up-level things and work on multiple problems at once.   Sometimes I can do this, but sometimes I really struggle.    It’s hard to tell what problems I’m going to obsess over when I first encounter them.

I used to program computers when they ran DOS.   I know you’re asking yourself, what is DOS?  Well kids, once there was a time when we had to work on computers that only displayed letters and those were in a 24x80 grid.   We did cleaver things like draw boxes out of ASCII characters.   DOS was single-threaded.   Programming had it challenges back then, but one thing that was pretty easy about it was that you only had to worry about the processor doing one thing at a time.   It couldn’t multi-task.   Now days you have multiple core processors and multi-threaded operating systems.  Programming is a little different now.   Our brains though, are a lot more like DOS than they are like Windows 7.  

People can only really think about one thing at a time.   When you think you’re multi-tasking, you’re actually just task switching.   You can do this pretty fast so it seems like you’re focused on multiple things, but you’re not.   My brain can sometimes forget to switch.   Sometimes it gets caught up in an infinite loop, processing on the same problem over and over.   I have to watch out for this in day to day life.   I have to try and remember to switch.   It’s really hard sometimes.