[caption id="" align="alignleft” width="368"]
Costard the clown from Love’s Labor’s Lost: “ore-parted."[/caption]
It’s over. Whatever it is you thought you could do, or others thought you could do, or you thought others could do, you — and they — are probably expecting too much. You — and probably everyone you know — don’t just have tasks. You’re overtasked.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that task is related to the word tax, and that the first occurrence of task in English concerned fines being levied. If you’re overtasked, you’re overtaxed. We’ve maintained the sense of tax as a burden of labor (“a taxing problem”) alongside the meaning of a financial obligation (“a problematic tax”).
Contemporary life didn’t invent the problem of being overtasked. John Milton uses the term overtask in his masque Comus, where the Ladie worries about getting lost in a night so dark that finding the path “would overtask the best land-pilots art / Without the guesse of sure well-practiz’d feet.”
Poets like overtask. The speaker in Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” lends a hand to the old man of the title (“You’re overtasked, good Simon Lee”) in cutting a pesky root.
Being overtasked is one thing, but being overparted is probably worse. A singer, for example, might be overtasked (singers flying from London to Los Angeles for the evening know the feeling), but to be overparted is to be given a role beyond one’s ability.
The OED reminds us that George Bernard Shaw, in his function as a music critic, used overparted in the 1890s. The word has persisted in contemporary criticism. (“His Act I went OK, but by Act 3 we knew we were hearing another tenor who’d been overparted.”)
The OED’s earliest entry for overparted points to Shakespeare, who uses it in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The clown Costard sneers at Sir Nathaniel, a curate assigned the role of Alexander the Great in a pageant of the Nine Worthies. Costard says he is “a little ore-parted,” which Edmund Malone long ago glossed as meaning “the part or character allotted to him in this piece is too considerable.”
A candidate for president who might be better suited for the mayoralty of a small town might be described as overparted. (Some Lingua Franca readers might cue the Peter Principle.)
The matter of tasks and parts, however, is obscured by the illusion we call multitasking.
The concept of multitasking emerged in the 1960s as a description of a CPU’s capabilities, not that of the wonderful Rebecca in your department’s central office.
The OED points to 1992 as a moment of multitasking transferred from the CPU to you and me. In a tartly ironic mood, William Safire opined: “Such companies require multilingual interpreters, and hire multimarket executives who engage in multitasking rather than do anything.”
But irony ain’t what it used to be. In the quarter century since Safire’s quip, multitasking has seeped into usage like chemicals into the water table.
The largely pernicious idea of multitasking is now ubiquitous. It embraces a particular fantasy of agency — as we work on too many things simultaneously, we imagine that we are in control, that the very act of haplessly engaging in too much, even if superficially, demonstrates our capacity to organize ourselves. As some T-shirt must say somewhere, there’s an i at the center of multitask.
Want to return to work by priority and tasks by sequence? Perhaps you could think of multitasking as multitaxing — and if that isn’t enough to push you back to concentrating on one thing at a time, maybe nothing will.
A wish and a goal for a new year: May you be neither overparted nor overtasked. Lack not ambition, but be reasonable as to what you can accomplish, and let those with whom you work know you recognize what is reasonable for them to do, too. Computers are good at multitasking. We’re not so much.
As for this humanist, his brain hopes that in 2016 it can take on one task at a time. Just as soon as it gets a defrag.