This topic has been on my mind again lately.
I've written about it before but I thought I'd give a quick summary of a couple of ideas I have for task loading. In this post I'll just focus on a couple of things you can use right out of the gate that will help.
The audience I have in mind here are novice divers.
Just to give a quick definition. For the purposes of this post I'll define "task loading" as having to handle more than one non-trivial task simultaneously.
In short, the more you slice up your attention between different tasks, the harder the big 3 get. The big 3 being
1. buoyancy control,
2. buddy contact and
3. communication.
So concept #1 is this. The "attention slices". I think of them as links in a chain. The more attention you give to one link in the chain, the less you have for the next one. As you go, you can delay a task (skip a link) and come back to it later but if you delay it for too long it might create a problem, which in turn becomes a new link in the chain that needs attention and so forth. If your chain of tasks gets "bunched up". Then something you didn't plan for could happen.
An example of this is what happened to a student of mine recently. He was engaged in a dive that was challenging his basic skills (buoyancy control, buddy contact, communication) and I gave him an additional task. The task (not that it matters, it could have been anything...) was to stop and hover while writing something in a note book. Just that one additional task caused him to delay giving attention to his buoyancy control and he started floating away from the bottom while he was writing in the book, to the point where he was losing focus on the big 3. By the time he started to correct, he had to give all of his attention to avoiding an unintentional ascent and in the process (a) was no longer able to communicate (b) would have lost contact with his buddy --me-- if I hadn't swum up with him and (c) was no longer in control of his buoyancy control. He also discarded my notebook in order to free up his hands, which was lost.... But that doesn't matter. What matters is what he learned.
I think anyone who has ever learned how to dive can relate to that.
So... what *could* my student have done to have remained in control there? This is where concept #2 comes into play. "Chaining". Chaining means that whatever you are doing, you need to keep coming back to the big 3 often enough that you don't lose control of them. That means that you need to "slice" your attention between tasks. In this case, my student could have written one letter (or one word) at a time and that pause to briefly give attention to the big 3 before returning to the task of writing in the book. Then write the next word and so forth.
So managing task loading means being aware of a few main concepts
- the big 3
- attention slicing
- chaining
and to balance non critical tasks using pauses in order to not lose control of the big 3.
The good news is that the amount of attention you need to give to the big 3 becomes less and less as they become more and more automated with experience. This means you can manage additional tasks better as you gain experience. However, no matter how long or how much you dive, there will always be times that you have to park a task and focus on "just diving" in order to free up attention.
I hope this makes sense to anyone who had the patience to read through it all and I hope it helps.
R..
I've written about it before but I thought I'd give a quick summary of a couple of ideas I have for task loading. In this post I'll just focus on a couple of things you can use right out of the gate that will help.
The audience I have in mind here are novice divers.
Just to give a quick definition. For the purposes of this post I'll define "task loading" as having to handle more than one non-trivial task simultaneously.
In short, the more you slice up your attention between different tasks, the harder the big 3 get. The big 3 being
1. buoyancy control,
2. buddy contact and
3. communication.
So concept #1 is this. The "attention slices". I think of them as links in a chain. The more attention you give to one link in the chain, the less you have for the next one. As you go, you can delay a task (skip a link) and come back to it later but if you delay it for too long it might create a problem, which in turn becomes a new link in the chain that needs attention and so forth. If your chain of tasks gets "bunched up". Then something you didn't plan for could happen.
An example of this is what happened to a student of mine recently. He was engaged in a dive that was challenging his basic skills (buoyancy control, buddy contact, communication) and I gave him an additional task. The task (not that it matters, it could have been anything...) was to stop and hover while writing something in a note book. Just that one additional task caused him to delay giving attention to his buoyancy control and he started floating away from the bottom while he was writing in the book, to the point where he was losing focus on the big 3. By the time he started to correct, he had to give all of his attention to avoiding an unintentional ascent and in the process (a) was no longer able to communicate (b) would have lost contact with his buddy --me-- if I hadn't swum up with him and (c) was no longer in control of his buoyancy control. He also discarded my notebook in order to free up his hands, which was lost.... But that doesn't matter. What matters is what he learned.
I think anyone who has ever learned how to dive can relate to that.
So... what *could* my student have done to have remained in control there? This is where concept #2 comes into play. "Chaining". Chaining means that whatever you are doing, you need to keep coming back to the big 3 often enough that you don't lose control of them. That means that you need to "slice" your attention between tasks. In this case, my student could have written one letter (or one word) at a time and that pause to briefly give attention to the big 3 before returning to the task of writing in the book. Then write the next word and so forth.
So managing task loading means being aware of a few main concepts
- the big 3
- attention slicing
- chaining
and to balance non critical tasks using pauses in order to not lose control of the big 3.
The good news is that the amount of attention you need to give to the big 3 becomes less and less as they become more and more automated with experience. This means you can manage additional tasks better as you gain experience. However, no matter how long or how much you dive, there will always be times that you have to park a task and focus on "just diving" in order to free up attention.
I hope this makes sense to anyone who had the patience to read through it all and I hope it helps.
R..
