B8: "The Unitasker"

Although the “Unitasker” went in each of Huxley’s 3 directions, there were never any concrete moments where you felt he was moving directly in a single direction. In the beginning, when the author introduced his topic he typically stayed in the direction towards the personal, the autobiographical, and inner experience, but as his writing progressed it was pretty sporadic. I’d say that the essay was much more like a conversation. He begins the essay with personal anecdotes and describes a setting, giving the readers context about where he is coming from and what he is trying to do. For his experiment, the author researched a lot about different theories involving his coined term “unitasking,” or focusing on one thing at a time and living in the now in order to help him with his experiment. He even goes as far as contacting and meeting with people who would most likely be the best at unitasking / limiting distractions and errors and proceeds to take their advice. He also asks questions and tries out a lot of different techniques in his experiment and provides the ups and downs of each option. He is very reflective as well as curious. He frequently goes off on tangents, as the human mind often does when it is trying to run a million miles a minute. Sometimes tangents are good, but other times they overwork your brain and pull your attention away from the task at hand. He specifically talks about tangents in his essay when he discusses his meditation experiences. It was interesting how he described and recorded a lot of his thought-tangents because that made the essay feel a lot more personal and human. He didn’t really define terms but he did describe things in different ways to help the author understand the message that he wanted to communicate. I really liked that he coined the term “unitasking” and possibly a few other “made up” terms such as “postcoitally”. He makes a lot of references that I was not sure about so I did have to look up some terms and people, but that is probably because I am never “hip” and do not know anything about pop culture or icons.