The Unitasker analysis

The Unitasker was a chapter in A.J. Jacobs novel The Guinea Pig Diaries, here a man is trying to do an experiment to see if he can go a full day without multitasking. The whole chapter is a mixture of both the dinner conversation and Aldous Huxley’s 3 directions that we talked about in class. It was written pretty informal starting out with a story about him and his wife almost dying in a car crash, to show the motivation behind his experiment. This goes with the dinner conversation, where someone talks about their own personal experiences. Similar to most diaries he writes mainly about his own personal thoughts, while trying to become a unitasker. He asks several questions to himself and even adds some jokes, all in a way that you would sort of talk to a friend due it being a diary. Then it goes into Huxley’s 3 directions, when he starts to become more factual and do research. An example of this is under" just sit" when he hears about meditation. Apparently, a lot of studies have said that it is a great way to practice focus, which would help him with his experiment. When he practiced it and failed he turned to research stating that that he was reading a “knee-high stack of meditation books”. All of that going along with two from Huxley’s 3 directions, which is looking at the factual or concrete. At the end it goes to number three when he talks about what he learned from experiment. His main focus with his experiment was to try to eliminate multitasking all together. In the end, he learned that people can multitask, but they should do it in smaller doses. A lot of people have stopped living in the moment to try to do multiple things at one time. Even when someone is just talking on the phone and mopping it still effects the conversation that they are having. Once in a while we all just have to stop what we are doing and put “nickels in a watermelon bank” or focus on one thing at a time. This is a more abstract and universal concept that many of us do not really think about.