the intricacies of information-ADD

i think i have a very rare condition. or maybe a lot of people have it, i don't know. it's the disease you get when you have a short attention span, several ways to retrieve important information within a few feet of you, and multitasking tendencies. in my case, it commonly manifests itself in a less menacing form called Radio-ADD, which simply means scrolling through the 16 radio presets in my car, stopping exactly .00089 seconds or half a wavelength on each station (whichever's longer), until i find something i can no longer live without hearing.

i don't know of anything that cures information-ADD. the point, though, for you who may not be blessed with this valuable ability, is simply to absorb as much critical news as possible, in the shortest amount of time possible. so if you have information-ADD, you probably use multitasking to do it faster.

i just realized it because this is what i am doing (before i started typing this blog). please note the variety of mediums, because you cannot effectively micro-multitask with, say, 5 different radio stations. currently i am:

-watching FOXNEWS on tv
-listening to glenn beck on internet-radio
-reading cnn.com ("Three Years Later: Insecurity, Instability and Hope in Iraq"- good article)
-looking at all the random information in the back of the day planner (how to stop an infant from choking, different time zones, mileage between major U.S. cities)
-eating Frosted Shredded Wheat
-drinking coffee

as every multitasker knows, there is always a distinct yet subtle hierarchy in tasks. For example: since listening to Glenn Beck is a rare pleasantry, the radio is my first priority. then, when he gets boring or the commercials come on, i go back to my CNN article (which of course is right in front of my face the whole time i'm listening to the radio). while i'm scanning through that, looking for interesting or relevant tidbits and maybe not finding any, i might look over at the tv when i see pictures of a Wanted guy, and try to tell myself that if i ever see him, i'll remember his face and call to get the 1,000 dollars. i haven't really figured out how my day planner-perusing fits in; i just know that i see it when i look over at the TV, and then forget what i'm listening to/reading/typing and decide to pick it up and see what other goodies are in there. all the while, whenever i have a "break," i take a gulp of now-cold coffee or shove some more sugary cereal in my face. but this is not difficult because they require almost no space in my mental pipeline.

all these are very distinct events, but the thing is: they can happen several times per second. it can be less often than that, but i think my record is radio-article-tv-article-radio-tv in about one second. this is called Micro-Multitasking.

i'm getting really good at this. especially when you add blogging to the mix. now that takes talent. granted, i can't switch back to the cnn article while i'm typing, but i can still listen to Glenn and watch FOX sporadically while i type, and since typing is more mentally involved than reading (plus, it's dispersing rather than absorbing), this is like the next level of information-micro-multitasking. can you disperse and absorb at the same time!!? maybe you can. it depends on how many times you can mentally switch back and forth between tasks, and for the seasoned micro-multitasker, it involves a dozen micro-judgments per second. while you're typing, you have to decide: are you going to miss something precious and irreplaceable if you don't give your full attention to the radio this nanosecond? maybe not, but can you make this decision without slowing your words per minute or typing a bunch of nonsense? what about the radio volume, and is the TV going to flash that cool statistic ever again?

the big secret, though, is the existence of micro-caches. they hold information or body-programming for one or two seconds without you trying to remember it. the micro-caches enable you to blank out in a meeting, and when someone calls on you to repeat what he said, even if you weren't listening, you might remember the last few words. so if you try really hard, you can tap into those temporary memory caches in your mind and, for example, finish typing a sentence without thinking about typing, thereby freeing up your precious attention to focus on the radio. this is the most critical aspect of micro-multitasking.

reading back over this...wow. twitch. i don't know why my parents never gave me ADD drugs when i was little. at least, they didn't that i know of. they probably should have.

people, do you have this condition? have you *twitch* ever heard of a *twitch* cure? what is your favorite way to micro-multi-information-task?