Can Aspies multitask?

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I really love your analogy with the computer.

I do not like to multitask as nothing gets done properly, I get angry and in a tizz. Having a conversation on the phone while shopping would be terrible. I certainly never do that. Shops are stressy enough at the best of times.

I think perhaps that women are better at multitasking than men - women can work and gossip, but men definitely need to down tools to gossip!! !

I can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time.

I sure can't, if I try it doesn't end well.

Like someone back there said, no one can multitask, it's all about switching. There's room for technique to help, but as an aspie you're handicapped

I've learned to do multitasking; but, I'm not good at it, I don't like it and it's all coping mechanism. At work, whenever I get a new task, I write it down on the steno pad I always keep with me. I've trained myself to look at the pad whenever I'm distracted from my current task. Sometimes they want me to interrupt my work every 15 minutes to check for a problem; but, spend the rest of my time on my main project. I found a timer app for my phone that will give me an alarm every 15min (or however long). It's the only way I can do that. What really screws me up is when I get several tasks or interruptions so fast that I can't write them down.
I keep a separate list for personal tasks.

I can actually multitask very well.

I feel more productive and I do better when I multitask.

I can multitask as long as I'm not doing anything too difficult. I sometimes need to multitask to be able to focus.

Yes I can multitask; I work much more efficiently at a single task though.

My company has two product lines and I'm heavily involved with both. One product line is growing and one is shrinking. Working on both of them causes serious problems as a result of multitasking issues and both lines suffer as a result.

Effective at the end of this year, the line that is shrinking will be permanently discontinued. It will actually help since for the last three or four years, the product line cost more to do than it brings in. The line that is growing has been subsidizing the one that is shrinking.

One nice thing about it is that the one that is growing demands less of my time than the one that is shrinking. I'll be able to do much of my work from home and may not even have to go to the office most days.

The best part is that the shrinking line has a potentially enormous liability. Removing that potential liability will definitely help. As it stands now, for the $3,000 or so per year that the product will bring in this year, there is a potential liability of hundreds of thousands of dollars per customer. The product line that is growing has very few potential liability problems.

A while ago, Dr Oz interviewed a researcher who specializes in cognitive psychology, who said that multi-tasking is in fact very rare - almost no-one can do it, though many people say or believe that they can.

However inherent in the issue must be the fact of how you define multi-tasking (I don't know how the researcher defined it). For example, I can drive, I am quite a good driver, and that seems to require a degree of multi-tasking (having to attend to more than one action simultaneously).

I wonder why this term even cropped up though - we never heard of it years ago, then suddenly all sorts of people were bragging that they could multi-task - as though that made them superior somehow. It seemed to be just some new thing for people to attach their ego to - does anyone know how it began?

Overall, I think it is pretty meaningless, will be glad when it drops out of use.

What I was thinking about in multitasking was having multiple tasks to do but only doing one at a time.

I don't switch tasks very readily. Some people can switch back and forth pretty quickly. In general, I agree with the previous poster, B19, that very few people can actually do two things at once unless those actions are pretty automatic.

I always figure that multitasking is about like consciously trying not to think of an elephant at any time in the next five minutes.