Years ago, if you’d looked up “multitasking” in the dictionary, my picture would have been next to the entry. I was good at it. Practically flawless, in fact, and proud of it.
Of course, I was not the only one. So many women I knew juggled care, schedules, and appointments for four or more people, along with property maintenance, groceries, bills, and battles with the various institutions attached to all of the above (looking mostly at you, insurance companies). It made perfect sense that we would do this. Most of us had stepped away from careers to raise families, and our minds were still in achievement-mode. We arrived at our new stay-at-home frontier primed to organize and accomplish. In that world where very little stays finished and instant gratification is hard to come by (looking mostly at you, kids), there was satisfaction in knowing we could provide stability and security for the people in our lives. We were quite possibly the reason everyone stayed afloat.
I still have a lot to do, even though the scope of responsibility has changed. My household is smaller. School schedules and extra-currics no longer fill my calendars, and I’m not making medical appointments or arranging activities meant to keep my children in one healthy piece. But although taking care of kids can be exhausting, their wellbeing was one of the major gratifications of multitasking in the first place. Without the kid component in the picture, the tasks on my list often feel like dreck nobody else wants to do.
Resentment is not a particularly satisfying emotion.
According to NIH, multitasking is defined as trying to perform two or more tasks at the same time. Research shows it isn’t good for our brains. When we multitask, we switch back and forth between several tasks all at once, leaving one job unfinished while we flit to another. We’re constantly processing competing streams of information, most of which is completely irrelevant to the other tasks we’re trying to complete. This can increase mistakes, decrease efficiency, and lead to memory problems.
Apparently, our brains are wired to work on one thing at a time … which sounds great to me–almost like a vacation–so why am I still multitasking?
I can’t blame the world for this. This one’s on me. Other people’s expectations don’t even enter into it. Somehow, I’ve let “more” equal “best” in almost everything (looking mostly at you, weight). This ability to do too many things at one time has morphed into more than accomplishment: it’s become the measure of my self-worth.
This is not a stop-and-smell-the-roses post. (Like most multitaskers, I can do that at the same time I do everything else.) This is about giving ourselves the grace to stay in each moment and trust that our response to it will be enough. It’s possible that the layers of busy-ness and piles of action we cram into our brains prevent us from accessing wisdom and value that’s uniquely ours. By doing less, maybe we’ll offer more.
There will always be things to do. They just don’t always have to be done at the same time. Who knows? Given space, we might even do them better.
Whew, do I feel this. I come from journalism, where I regularly worked on 2-3 news stories at once. I’d be making calls to set up interviews for one, going to an interview for another, and then typing up my notes into a story on still another. And if I got a call back for Story A while writing Story B, I had to switch gears in an instant. All while in the midst of the noisy, open plan bullpen of a newsroom.
I don’t have to work like this anymore, but these grooves in my neural pathways are carved pretty deep….
Kristina, it’s hard to shake old training, especially when that’s what made you successful in the past.