Oi - that’s mine!!

This morning, at the airport going through security (and for once this is NOT an alopecia story) I was distracted. I was on a conference call and had to put the phone down whilst it went through the machine.

I am a master of multitasking badly.

So as my bags and items, came out of the Xray machine, I picked up the phone so as to continue my call and somewhat distractedly packed my goods, back into my bag, liquids, boarding pass, PC etc

As I was ready to leave the area, a man tapped me on the shoulders. Oh here we go, I thought. So I turned around, and saw another passenger looking at me oddly. He kindly said, “I think you have my PC in your bag”. I instantly unzipped my bag and revealed what looked like my PC. However on closer examination, it was not mine. Horror of horrors. I had picked up his and put it into my bag!

Oh my god, I was so apologetic, and we quickly swapped. Conversation over and off he went.

My word, can you imagine how bad that would have been. Me opening up my laptop either on the plane or in the Warsaw office later that day, only to find a random laptop which clearly didn’t hold my information nor accept my passwords.

That would have been embarrassing!

It was so close.

Luckily the man was not so pre-occupied, or too distracted to pay attention to his personal goods.

So nothing happened, but it got me thinking of all the things like this that occur on a daily basis, because I am multitasking badly. My attention was clearly elsewhere and I missed the obvious.

What else had I missed that morning? What else was I missing every day?

It’s a hard one, as multi tasking is sometimes really effective in getting thought the workload, but clearly there is a cost to this, which may not always be evident.

So let me ask you. Do you multitask? Is it effective? What have you done in moments of distraction?