Multitasking redux

To say that the life of an MTurk worker is an easy one would be a lie. The Art of it - at least, what specialized skills you may acquire after making twenty-five cents a day for a few weeks, with luck - lays in finding out where you excel. That's the Art. The Mastery is all about skills any serious gamer will possess: Being the first to click on the right button. For, not only must one decide on what kind of job to accept, one must also be fast and/or lucky enough to be the one grabbing it! In that, I guess I was lucky - for a while there, I think I was editing about 60-70 percent of all Casting Words transcripts, or top of grading both edits and transcripts. Business was quiet - I run a tech support company, and I'm good at that so my clients don't need to call me that often - and I would sit in front of my screen 12 hours a day, waiting either for the phone to ring or for a CW hit to show up.

Why not do penny HITs in the meantime? One good reason - I missed too many good edit jobs because I was doing something else. At the top of my game, a $3 edit would take me less than 20 minutes. At 0.01 each, that's 300 cheap jobs. At best THAT would take me about the same time, for a boring and repetitious task. So I focused on edits. And made a substantial amount of Amazon Bucks in the process - enough to replace my whole camping kit, the original purpose. Of course I could not maintain that production level forever. I started pushing it too much, started making mistakes, and even though my guardian angel at CW was kind and considerate in mentioning it, I though it was better to scale down a bit. My father, bless his soul, told me that a job worth doing is worth doing well. So I took pride both in the production volume and the quality of it. When either started failing, it was time for a break.

Some impact that I may have had? I think I was one of the first to give really detailed gradings. I also started annotating my edits, so that those grading it could, at a glance, see what work had been done. I am not saying that I started the patterns - but there were very few back then doing it. I am happy to see that these are now SOP. Once the camping gear purchased, I had little motivation to keep the pace, anyway. Then I found out I had to move, and didn't go camping after all. Sob... But that's another story. Never deal with Lacombe Transport, that's my only advice on THAT topic.

But now... Mmmm, i have my eye on a nice electric assisted bicycle on Amazon. I may just have to unretire ;) -

Posted by MTEQC.COM