My head hurts. I have Pink Eye; a gift from my daughter and to her from the herd of children we associate with. Kaitlin appears to have caught it Monday; I think I caught it from her yesterday. I took an hour off from work to go get eye drops for the both of us. Kaitlin is out of school for the day, but I have to work. The down-side of being a ‘virtual’ worker is that it is somehow more difficult to claim I am sick. I have an annoying headache which is killing my ability to task-switch when I work, however.

I think multi-tasking is largely bunk. No one really can do that. What people can excel at is task-switching. I can, at times, be extremely efficient switching rapidly between differing tasks at work. This is where I think a great deal of my productivity derives. Not that I get things done faster, rather, I can keep more time-critical tasks moving forward, specifically short-order tasks. This keeps other people I work with able to continue their work with less delay.

Not all tasks are like that. Yesterday I churned a remarkable amount of useful code. I could not do that with constant distractions. Today, with the eye-strain induced headache, my ability to switch tasks from code writing to anything else killed all my productivity, even though the interruptions where trivial.

I am taking the night off from Tae Kwon Do. Since I just started the eye treatments, I think it would be wise to stay away from the kids for a night. That and my headache do not make a child-friendly mixture.