Life was easier in the past for several fundamental reasons. It used to be that most people made their living from the product of using their hands and bodies. It might take a long time to learn the skills necessary to track and hunt animals, to make tools, to work with natural materials, to prepare and cook food or husband animals, but once learned there was very little more that needed to be learned.

Information and solutions could be handed down from one generation to the next. Little or no understanding of the underlying principles was needed if the method worked time and time again. A lot of new developments simply came out of trial and error and chance results that were noted and acted upon. Problem solving was rarely carried out by anyone other than the rare analytical thinker.

Thus for generations, most people spent almost no time or effort on solving new problems. They learned their necessary skills, maybe studied a trade, and then repeated those processes year after year. The additional advantage of learning skills that are predominantly based upon hand, eye and body coordination is that after a while, you can reach a level of unconscious competence, whereby you no longer have to consciously think about what to do or how to proceed. This meant that the ‘monkey mind,’ that free ranging voice inside of your head, could do more or less whatever it pleased unhindered.

Of course, boredom was ever present, but because so many basic skills could be carried out without conscious thought a lot of other entertainments could be enacted at the same time. For example, the work songs of laborers and sailors, or the dances that came forth from work activities and that form the basis of some traditional folk dances, or just general tittle-tattle.

The only way that you can truly multi-task is to do one subconscious physical activity and another conscious activity - such as singing, whistling, humming or talking - at the same time.

Today, we have to do activities that are very different to those good old days. More and more of us (and probably most readers of this blog) do work that involves a lot of distinct analysis, problem solving and decision making and very little physically repetitive activity. This places a great strain upon our mental capacities. We rarely get to a stage where we can do the bulk of our work subconsciously.