One could take a title like that in a number of directions. OS = Operating System, if you didn’t know.
What this essay is about is: “time management” and the realization that pondering your own time management problems, and those of an operating system, is a way to develop a head for computer systems, often a useful end goal in itself, in a civilization wherein computer fluency is becoming ubiquitous (because computers are).
An operating system has the job of task switching. You know how onerous that can be, from experience. You’re deeply immersed in such and such a task, with full concentration, and by pre-arrangement or bell, or because of your “schedule” you have to switch gears all of a sudden. Maybe someone interrupts you, and you forget everything. Or you startle, and mess up that piece you were gluing, to a ship in a bottle. Frustrating. People get angry at moments like this, because they feel helpless, robbed of decision-making power.
Something to remember at times like this, is how liberating it can be to unplug. That’s how it seems in hindsight, once unplugged. You were stuck in a no-win time-wasting situation it looks like now.
With some time away, doing something else, you will actually do better overall, including with the original task. You were blocking, waiting, spinning a mutex (as a programmer might think…
