Right now, I'm typing a blog post, chatting online with 5 different people, running some code in the background, listening to music, and I have a movie on silent in the background. My name is Michael, and I'm a multitasker.

Growing up, being a multitasker was something my friends and I aspired to. "Look at me! I can juggle while riding my bike and listening to my Walkman!" These exhibitions often had predictable results, yet we kept them up. This was doubly true when working with computers. Suddenly, we have the option to be bombarded with tons of different kinds of media - of course I'm going to take advantage of it! Hell yes, I'm going to listen to Led Zeppelin while watching Starship Troopers and Apocalypse Now playing at the same time in the foreground (all while playing a game on a laptop). Maybe I'll even process some audio, burn a CD and clip my toenails while I wait for a sufficient amount of Vespene Gas.

As computers, which allowed us to be amazing multitaskers, became more prevalent, we started trying to be more like computers.

However, research is increasingly showing that the human brain just doesn't really do multitasking all that well. Manual tasks are okay, though we don't really remember a damn thing about what we did. And that's one of the main problems with multitasking. We work on autopilot as much as we can and retain very little memory about what we did. As a result, our work and our lives suffer. Our society's ADD is getting worse.

It's not just our work that suffers, however. As Walter Kirn wrote in, "The Autumn of the Multitaskers," which appeared in the November issue of The Atlantic Monthly:

Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.

Say what you will about society, but prematurely aging us? That is not cool. Not cool at all.

And it's all the fault of the computers.

Let the resistance begin. Start focusing on individual problems and accomplishing them with your full focus and energy. While it's certainly a bad idea to focus entirely on one thing to the exclusion of all others in the long term, concentrated bursts of focus are needed. If you don't, the computers will win.