thrash vi.
To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything
useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded waste most
of their time moving data into and out of core (rather than
performing useful computation) and are therefore said to thrash.
Someone who keeps changing his mind (esp. about what to work on
next) is said to be thrashing. A person frantically trying to
execute too many tasks at once (and not spending enough time on
any single task) may also be described as thrashing. Compare
multitask.