The Perils of a One-Track-Mind

"You've got a one-track-mind!"

It's often said derogatorily, directed towards a male person and delivered with a high innuendo factor. Just another hackneyed cliché*, it's always eager to be rolled out, sitting at the ready on the tip of many a friendly wag's tongue.

Thing is, there is no other sort of mind. At least not when it comes to using the 'thinking part' of one's brain. Sure, there's a plethora of tasks going on in the old grey matter, all at the same time. You could be eating a bar of chocolate while climbing the stairs while reading a text message while thinking about the witty reply you'll send. You might switch your thoughts to how tasty the chocolate is, or how sexy the person in front of you looks from this angle, or how much more sexy they'd be if covered in melted milk chocolate (a token nod to the standard 'one-track-mind' accusers) but I'll bet you will only actively think about one of those things at any one time.

Multi-task! That's what we need to do. Even us men. The modern world demands it. But multi-tasking doesn't mean you're applying your brainpower to more than one thing at the same time. It requires you to switch your attention from one thing to the next and then the next and so on until you switch back to the first thing and start all over again.

And often, starting all over again is exactly what we do. It's hard to pick up where you left off without a recap of where you were in the particular process of each task in the chain, and the more tasks in the chain the greater the amount of time spent recapping at each task-switch. "It don't seem very 'fficient to me, mum!"

It was, perhaps, logic of this sort that led me to apply myself solely to the task of organising all the files on my hard drive after the Big Crash, I've-started-so-I'll-finish style, rather than switch between that and regaling my multitudinous blog readers, writing my next novel and attending to my correspondence. The upside is that my hard drive is now lean and clean, which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside, me being a bit of a geek and all that.

Downsides? I'll just pretend there aren't any - got to protect the warm fuzzy feeling dontcha know!

_{* 'hackneyed cliché' - now there's a cliché for you!}

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