I’m not very good at multitasking.

I’ll go so far as to say that I’m extremely bad at multitasking. In my defence, I think everyone is bad at it, and those people who say they’re good at it are lying, either to themselves (more likely) or everyone else. Humans don’t multitask. We handle one thing at a time, and either we switch between that one thing (and everything slows down) or we focus on that one thing and things get done faster.

I remember when I was a manager at the small R&D company I worked at doing an exercise to prove how bad everyone was at multitasking: basically people were given a series of simple tasks and told either to do one to completion, or to split their attention between several to try and get them done faster. No question, the splitting of attention always, always-always resulted in much slower output.

Anyway, in my case the problem is having too many stories on the go at the same time. Right now I have the novel, the podcast, and a few short stories, all of which I’m trying to work on at the same time. And that’s a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, if I ever find myself lagging on one story, I can just switch to something else, keeping every writing day fresh and interesting! But on the other hand, it feels like the progress I’m making on each story is glacial.

This occurred to me today because I realized that it’s been a few months since I worked on my most recent short story. I think it may have been August? Something like that. Time really creeps up on you when you’re not looking!

With some luck, I’ll get some progress on it today. I guess we’ll see!