Multi-tasking vs. Scheduling
You were right to just a limited level. I do not enjoy having too many simultaneous task to be dealing with. I do, however, need to deal with such circumstances often in my life. The solution is to convert what you referred to as multi-tasking** into a serial sequence of tasks.
Napoleon was said to be able to read, talk and listen all at one, but I say it's an arrogant, pretentious French legend. Nobody can in reality do more than one thing at a given time (in computers, parallel machines are the only such example).
A person can claim to be able to talk and listen at once, but what is common is for the person to concentrate on the flow of speech and then, once completed, process what was audible.
My solution is to break the many tasks into a series of tasks, write them down if necessary and then deal with them wholly one at a time. Trying to ignore this advice and, as you said, "sending e-mail while having a phone conversation with your parents, while trying to read something important you just downloaded?' will typically result in a poor E-mail composition and a detached conversation.
Even a person like me, being very organised and having an astonishing memory, tends to have a Senior moment once in a while. Yesterday while I was preparing my bag for the health club, the phone suddenly rang and I was invited for an assessment day and a possible job interview next week in Nottingham. If it were not for the visual indicators around the room, I would not have been able to pick things up from the point at which they were interrupted.
** Multi-tasking is a common term in operating systems terminology. The operating system gives you the illusion that it deals with many tasks all at one, but in fact it polls to serve each one of them according to a time-sharing scheme.
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