A Tiny Essay on Task Shielding


written by Aristo Tacoma


April 2026



Prelude
You may see this as a sort of appendix to the Magic of
Time booklet.
















It's a thrill to experience the triumph of achieving
something according to goals one has entertained, after
working on it, not being entirely sure that success is at
hand before it present itself. It is an experience of
meditation. While a 'goal' or an 'aim' sounds like a type
of purpose-oriented mind set that is not meditative, it
can become meditative by virtue of the harmonious
concentration, the gathering of attention, the consistency
of approach, the wholeness of the action.
  In some circumstances, a successful activity with such a
goal has in it a danger of a setback. It can be a very
small danger--we are talking of a small risk, or small
probability of there being an issue--but what is at stake
may sometimes be utterly severe. But when you can control
the risk eg by being extra precise at the right moments,
even such severe dangers do not pose an objection to the
action. In other cases, we may have a risk of a different
type--a small setback, but not so low probability of it
taking place.
  In some forms of actions, or tasks, it is possible to
minimize the risk by focussed attention and freedom from
distraction. Now when you think of something as important,
less important things which ask for your attention may be
experienced as 'distractions'. It is in the nature of our
working situations to allow for work to be defined as
'important', and yet we must sometimes allow for these
other tasks, which come upon us, because it is not always
so that that which is unexpected and irrelevant to the
task at hand can be ignored: there are vital needs, and
there are other, yet deeper priorities in one's life than
that which is at hand in one's work.
  This ties up also to our assessments of risks. In
setting aside a number of hours for a piece of work, one
may call on certain barriers, at least mentally, so as to
shield the task from disturbances, distractions. But what
is the risk one is taking by such task shielding? Suppose
one stays at one's working place, focussed on getting
something done, and one makes oneself as unavailable as
possible to other people who may want one's attention.
Could there not be that some of these other people in fact
have something very important to say? Or perhaps one has a
technological instrument, a computer, to assist one in
paying attention to several activities one is engaged in.
The computer can be turned off; or disconnected from its
networks; or one can simply use other programs on it. In
that way, the computers may help one to do what we can
call a 'task shielding'.
  In shielding a task, one should assess the risks, so
that the shield has a sense of calculated risk about it.
One must be ready to apologize if it turns out, later on,
that one over-shielded and prevented something good from
happening by being too focussed on a bit of work.
  In shielding a task, therefore, one is making a plan,
and the plan has an intuitive component: the flow and ebb
of life's events are beyond what can be predicted
according to logic and normal knowledge, but one can get a
sense of what is to come via intuition. One can sense that
the task may be shielded for such-and-such period of time
and while there is some risk of that sort, and some risk
of that sort, the risks do not feel to be significant
right now, so one can give oneself the green signal to go
ahead with the task shielding.
  Now why is this important, to be willing to shield tasks
like this? Because some tasks cannot be done unless they
are properly shielded; and some of these tasks may be a
sort of carrier wave for society or even one's own life at
present.
  In other words, there are tasks of such a kind that any
attempt to combine the fulfilment of these tasks with
almost any other tasks would simply dissolve the action,
or render it too dangerous.
  In outlining these my ideas of task shielding, I have
had in mind, in parts, that of having a 'business day'; in
other words, I have been thinking, to some extent, as to
how to plan each day eg in the upcoming week.
  Obviously we can extend the time perspective, and open
up for more complex kinds of task shielding. It is
perfectly possible to work for instance monthly or some
times pr month, eg some hours at a time, with a task of a
kind that must be more or less absolutely shielded from
distractions while it is done, but which then can be left
to itself and one can pick up from where one left next
time one goes into working on that task again. My own
personal word for this sort behaviour is the "pollate"
between various actions. I use it also when I do
programming. When, for instance, you wish the computer to
appear to be simultaneously active and responsive in
several ways all at once, even though it has only a single
sequence of instructions running through its electronics,
you can set it up to 'pollate' between various activities
in rapid succession. Each activity may have its own set of
information variables. These are updated as each activity
has some progress. A split second is given to one activity
and next split second is given to another activity and
after another split second a third activity is given CPU
power (let us not say 'attention' when we speak of a
computer, but reserve these psychological concepts to
human beins). The rapid switch between these actions give
the computer the appearance of being able to handle many
processes in parallel. There is a 'pollation' taking
place.
  If you wish to improve your language skills, for
instance, you may set aside some time for this--shielded,
perhaps, from distractions--and after a day or two set
aside more time for this. And you can have several such
independently progressing projects, some more shielded
than others.
  Yet there are activities that take time to start up, so
much time that in order for them to have a meaningful
progress each time, a considerable number of hours must be
given to them. And some of these activities may involve
a probability of dangerous setbacks unless done with
intense attention, focussed intelligence, full creative
intuition and awareness. These probabilities of dangerous
setbacks for some activities may only be adjustable by
means of intense task-shielding. In other words, some
tasks are too dangerous to do unless done in a context of
perfect privacy. It is a privacy that must be enforced or
else the action must be avoided. And in some cases, the
action is necessary: in other words, there are even
greater dangerous by avoiding the action. In such a case,
the task shielding acquires a sense of strong necessity,
for the task itself is necessary and the shielding also is
necessary for it to be completed without undue risks.

Now you may wonder, what on Earth is he talking about,--
what are these tasks which must be shielded so intensely?
But it is my proposition that I'm merely describing
something we're doing all the time, to a varying extent,
as regards mostly all actions, even though perhaps we do
not describe it this way. Name any action that is
entirely free from all sorts of risks in every way. Even
drinking water can make you choke. All actions have risks
associated with them. Now name any action that you for
sure can do even if completely distracted--I can maybe
argue that laughing is action that we can perfectly well
do when distracted, and breathing, and a few others like
that--but most actions demand some degree of focus. When
you have a bath or a shower, certainly you must take care
not to scold yourself nor to give yourself a cold; when
you have kinky sex, you must take care not to damage the
persons involved; when you drive a car, you must stick to
the road, and watch what is going on at the road; when you
put a bet on currency trading, you must have that which
Ian Fleming calls a state of mind which is 'half intuitive
and half mathematical', or the rational intuitive state of
mind. The risks of losing are thereby minimized, while
skill can lead to income, also significant income.

And so the list goes on and on. There are things only
worth doing if done really well, with quality attention
through and through, and we must so to speak 'negotiate
with life' in order to get the space, and the intervals
of time, in which these things can be done properly. And
so this approach to managing our work time can enter both
into our meditations in the morning, and in our plans; and
we can consciously evaluate the risks of embracing certain
actions, which may or may not take much time, in an aura
of privacy and freedom from connection to other events.
This is not as much a 'managing of time' as a managing of
tasks within the flow of time, a flow of time which has in
it a sense of synchronicity beyond determinism, and in
which our freedom to make good deep choices are helped
also by suitable pre-meditations on subjects like we have
here thought about.



















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