Tag Archives: James Chartrand

You Aren’t Really Multitasking and 99 Other Surprises

Personal Productivity, , , ,

The things you find on the web: going from one thing to another, you click, you stumble on stuff, I have to say, I love it. Yesterday I found Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. in Psychology, who has a fascinating series called 100 Things You Should Know About People. That’s on a blog I found called What Makes Them Click.

For example, her #7, You actually can’t multi-task:

The research shows that people can attend to only one cognitive task at a time. You can only be thinking about one thing at a time. You can only be conducting one mental activity at a time. So you can be talking or you can be reading. You can be reading or you can be typing. You can be listening or you can be reading. One thing at a time.

She finds one exception:

The only exception that the research has uncovered is that if you are doing a physical task that you have done very very often and you are very good at, then you can do that physical task while you are doing a mental task. So if you are an adult and you have learned to walk then you can walk and talk at the same time.

But even there, she has doubts related to walking and talking on a cell phone. And then she attacks the common assumption that the millennial generation does multi-task while the rest of us don’t, with research from Stanford to back her up.

It’s all very interesting. And I found it reading 7 ways to improve your writing, by the so-called James Chartrand, on CopyBlogger. She (yes, James is a woman, but that’s another story) used one of Susan’s surprises to talk about ideal line length. I love the web. Maybe that jumping around isn’t multi-tasking, but it is multi-interesting. And kind of fun.

(Image credit: ifong/Shutterstock)

Why Men With Pens is Written by a Woman. And Why That Matters.

Current Affairs, Weblogs, Writing, , , , , ,

Honestly, except for the name itself, I’ve never cared or wondered whether the author of Men With Pens was man or woman. It’s a good blog for writers. I did assume man, of course, because of the name of the blog, and the byline. This isn’t something I think about.

But I was shocked to read Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants as a post in CopyBlogger yesterday. It turns out that James Chartrand, author of the Men With Pens blog, @menwithpens on Twitter, is a woman, not a man.

Why do I care? I don’t care that she’s a woman and not a man. It makes no difference to the value of the content.  But I do care about the story she (James Chartrand) tells, and why she uses a man’s name.

Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.

No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.

Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.

Did I quit promoting my own name? Hell yeah.

I do believe that the difference between genders is the most interesting thing in creation. But I don’t believe in gender differences in jobs or opportunity and particularly not in writing. My favorite bloggers are about half and half, men and women. I just want the posts to be useful, interesting, amusing, and good. I’m as likely to read Pamela Slim or Anita Campbell as I am to read Seth Godin or John Jantsch. I like to think the world has come a long way since I was born in 1948. That the chauvinism we took for granted without even thinking about it in the 1950s and 1960s has given way to a better, more equal world.

Maybe so; but “more equal” isn’t the same as “equal.” Damn. Ask James Chartrand about that.

Everybody should read Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants. And everybody who cares about writing and blogging should subscribe to her blog – not because of her gender, or her surprising revelation about gender disguised, but, rather, because it’s got a lot of good content.