Sometimes, and today is definitely one of those times, I just sit in front of the computer, and wonder what to write?

It doesn’t take too long for the next logical question to arise: Why to write at all?

The answer is sitting pretty, right in front of my eyes. I try to pretend that I can’t see it. It just smiles and does nothing. It knows that sooner or later I will have to acknowlege it’s presence. When I do that, it can have all the fun it wishes to have with me.

So, I acknowledge the answer.  I have to write because I started this blog. Did I need one? Did I have a plan for it in my mind?  No, absolutely not!

I started it simply because I saw so many others, around me, doing the same. Of course, writing was something I loved to do, and something I still love to do, and something that I hope I will continue to love to do as long as I am alive.

And, yet, writing has become a chore.

What do you do when someone you love starts to seem like a nag? You either choose the easy way out and walk away, or you decide to take the more tortuous path of trying to make things right again. I think the same applies to things too.

If writing has become a chore, I can choose to stop writing and do the other things that I do, or hope to do  in the future. I could even take up a new hobby or a new activity. It would all be so easy. But, then, I would never feel the joy that I have felt every time I have finished a piece of writing. Nothing, in this world, can replace that feeling.

So, I choose to stay on and keep writing, and, when it becomes a chore, I will try and find newer ways to fall back in love with what I have always loved.

Do you ever feel that writing a blog post has become a task, that has to be  completed? How do you deal with the boredom that accompanies blogging?

We, like our forefathers, live in an age where a day is made up of 24 hours. But, unlike our forefathers, the things we can do – we have to do – in these 24 hours have increased manifold. So, not surprisingly, we find ourselves short of time.

Problems are nothing new to man. From times immemorial, he has faced problems and found ingenious ways to deal with them. To tackle the shortage of time, he is now facing, man discovered multitasking – the act of performing many jobs at the same time. The idea of multitasking gained popularity with the advent of the computer. The computers could multitask, and by multitasking the performance of computers increased dramatically. If the computer could do it, so could he, man thought.

For the past few years, the general belief has been that a man who can multitask is more efficient than the man who can’t. So, most of us have been trying to master the art of multitasking. I am no exception.

However, multitasking is good, if it is good at all, only for tasks that are routine and not important. Most of the activities that human beings perform, especially creative ones, require complete attention. And if that attention wanders then either the performance of the activity is hampered, or the activity is performed sub-optimally.

Let us take the example of writing a blog post. When you are writing a post, you are constantly thinking of ways to make the post better. You are looking for the right words, for the right image that you could use with your post. It takes sometime to get into the thinking mode. If in the middle of it, you receive a message from a chat friend, your mind is distracted. After you are done with the chat, you have to get into the “writing post” mode allover again. The post that you could have written in 30 minutes, takes many hours, and sometimes it never gets written.

Not only that, the quality of the post also gets affected by the continuous distractions that we face while we are multitasking.

In the earlier days, I tried hard to master the art of multitasking,and, to some extent, I was successful. But, now, I feel that there are times when it is best not to multitask.There are times when it is better to focus on one thing at a time. You could actually get more done that way.

Do you multitask? Do you think it affects you in a negative way?