because the world needs more lime green.

2.18.2005

In Praise of Slow.

Picked this book up from the library, and so far I've just read the first 20 or so pages, but it seems to have some good insights. We multitask. We hurry. We stress. Who was it who said "To do two things at once is to do neither"? And I'm definitely guilty of that too... I usually have at least four browser tabs open, when I was playing my stupid online text based game I would also often be talking to several people at once on IRC or ICQ and I could tell that the quality of my conversations really dropped when I did that, and I could only have a good convo with someone if I cut out the other things and just focused on it. But did that realization stop me from multitasking? Nope!

But I am a fairly patient person. Road rage, for example, is not an issue for me. I'm a calm driver, and I really don't mind sitting in the car, so traffic doesn't bother me much. If I have to be somewhere and I'm late then it might miff me a little bit, but really, what can you do?

And I just watched Fight Club again last night... "the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide".

It all fits in.

Slow in the context of the book is really more a state of mind than an actual method of doing things. It is good to do some things slowly, and really take the time to fully understand and appreciate them. And slow equates to calm and relaxed in many ways. Slow means doing things when you want to and not being tied to a clock.

While I've been writing this, my mouse has headed over to my browser to check a forum, or to check DeviantArt, and I've stopped myself. Am I missing anything by focusing on writing this instead of refreshing those pages? Of course not. Computers really encourage multitasking. You can have 12 applications open at once, switching back and forth. and do you get more done because of it? haha, yeah right.

I haven't watched TV in three or four years, but back when I did watch it, I often tried to multitask with it. I'd do homework in front of the TV, or read. And why? It just slowed me down. If I'd done the homework without interruptions, I'd have had more time to do things other than the homework. Instead, combining homework with watching TV just dragged out the task.

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