It's been a hot minute since I've published anything here
but I won't be using my #quitting focus to include this blog.
I spent about 6 weeks focused almost exclusively resting and restoring -
clearing my heart and mind so that I could hear the
voice of my soul describe what my next right step would be.
Of course, once my soul started talking I told it to shut up.
It was saying very clearly that I definitely wanted
to write a book and that now is the exact right time to do that.
What on earth could I write about that would take up twenty
or more chapters?
How does anyone string together 80,000 words?
What do I have to say about anything?
The real rub about being a trained leadership coach is that
I have a lot of education and experience
that allow me to hear the limiting beliefs that talented
people use to remain stuck when they're scared of reaching their potential.
Even when that person is me.
After trying to talk myself out of it,
I ultimately decided to listen.
I've already accidentally written five books worth of content
on this blog-why not do one on purpose?
It took another couple of weeks but
I've found a topic, a voice, and a structure for a thing
that I think I can stick with that might be worth sharing.
I've got about thirty thousand words already for something
that is incredibly healing for me, even if no one else reads it.
Most of my words will go towards that effort for the forseeable future
but I thought I'd pop in to discuss
my effort to break up with multi-tasking.
I'm still committed to #quitting many things in 2022
and multi-tasking is next on the chopping block.
I want to be honest that giving up multi-tasking is
a really tough challenge for me.
I built an entire life on my ability to do many things at once
and do them well (or at least better than my peers could).
For years I read business and efficiency experts
repeated feedback on professionals tendency to do more than one thing at a time.
I would snort sarcastically while I skimmed the most recent article
and manage to feel personally attacked.
They all said the same thing:
Multi-tasking is always bad.
Never do it.
Focus on only one thing at a time.
There was an inevitable round of new data,
charts and a new take on this behavior.
The authors' tone was sometimes pleading,
sometimes superior, sometimes exasperated.
They all agreed that's it's bad.
So why are we all still doing it?
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| An artist unintentional capture of my thought processes at Foundation in Asheville NC |
Ya'll know by now that
I believe in science and I value empirical evidence.
You probably also know by now that
I'm arrogant and subversive and have been known
to have just a touch of anger when an idea feels particularly
priveleged or unjust.
I somehow managed to have a LOT of feelings
over the years when someone piped up and reiterated
a condemnation of multi-tasking.
You see, most successful, professional people I know operate
in a space of doing more than one thing at a time.
If that successful, professional person is a woman?
Then I can all but guarantee she's doing 17 things simultaneously
and not only getting away with it, but getting
praised and promoted for every new thing she juggles
in her already heavy mix.
The bullshit of hustle culture practically demands that
we multi-task so that we can live up to the massive
expectations of having it all.
The disparity of patriachrical culture means
when women outsource the things that are overwhelming,
we will be judged in a negative way
much more harshly than our male counterparts.
What a racket huh?
Convince women they must do many things in order
to win at this game and also make sure
they know we're measuring their humanity against their ambition.
So each of those articles felt like a direct attack
against people like me and another way to negate
my lived experience.
How nice is it to have a job that allows you to focus
on a single thing at a time?
How privileged must you be to ignore the rest of the world
and all its needs while you honedyour craft on one problem at a time?
How do you find a profession or a tribe
that doesn't value you for your juggling to completion ratio?
The kind of irritation I had at these articles would have led
to other questions that I didn't really want to look at-
particularly how I contributed to my own caging.
So instead, I just added more things to my to do list
and got them done.
Often simultaneously.
Over the past couple of years though,
I've been changing my perspective a bit
and I'm actively wrestling with the role of multi-tasking in real time.
Yes. Again. I know what the data says.
I just need to make it make sense in my real life
before I can accept it.
Let me explain.
I still think we can carry multiple trains of thought at once
and we can still be productive when those trains of thought are
surface level, route tasks.
For instance, approving an expense report, filling out my timesheet
or clearing out junk email do not take up enough of my
brain to prohibit me from mentally running through
my calendar for the day, creating a grocery list
or thinking about a sale at one of my favorite stores.
These items don't necessarily need me to be creative in their execution.
I know the pattern, what is expected, and I can
allow that part of my brain to go into autopilot in the name
of progress or efficiency.
I couldn't keep my full focus engaged if I wanted to.
Arguably, if these tasks are so routine, I need to
find a way to automate them or outsource them.
In prepandemic life, I tended to have a set time to focus on mindless things
-first thing in the morning, 2pm bio-slump or
just before dinner while everyone is in a transition state already.
I might argue that I was doing one thing during this
timeframe and it was called 'Focusing on the minutiae of life'
or 'system maintenance'.
Post pandemic life has allowed me to change my tune a bit
about the value of multi-tasking.
One of the things that shifted for me in pandemic life
is that I worked remotely, sat in the same spot
in my house, staring into a computer screen.
No longer did I leave my office to go into a meeting room.
I joined a virtual meeting with one or more people.
No longer did I need assorted physical tools to facilitate
a meeting.
I used Lucid chart or MS Project and screen sharing tools built
into the video connection platform.
My physical world shrank and so did the multiple
lists of tasks that needed doing.
All my circuses ended up underneath the same little tent
instead of hidden behind curtains in separate places.
What I realized once they were all in one place was
that routine tasks had bloomed to take
an unmanageable amount of time.
I could spend whole days of mine doing things
that didn't need me to engage fully.
Also, pandemic work life meant
I was zooming from 7am until late at night-
doing my best to engage with the humans on the other
end of the screen.
There was no time to casually drop by and see someone
and no office door to shut while I quickly went through a few
mindless items or reset.
I was on a rinse, repeat cycle of an endless meeting cadence
so I developed a habit of doing mindless tasks while also
trying to listen in to meetings or have conversations in real life.
Colleagues would slack me while I was in a meeting
and I would reply back immediately if the response was something simple.
So I enabled people to ping me in multiple arenas at all hours of the day
and to expect a simple, quick response.
The backlog of approvals and tweaks that are
a normal part of office life got checked off while
I was also showing up to meetings where I wasn't
the primary leader or presenter.
Not only was I distracted, I was spending energy on
items that seemed easy but were so numerous that
they drained me before I could get to the chewy stuff.
This was rude and ineffective.
Unfortunately, I sometimes need to reap the consequences
of my arrogance before I change my actual behavior.
I missed opportunities to connect with people in a meaningful
way and I regret it.
Sorry ya'll.
I'm an inadvertent jerk more times than I mean to be.
People matter most to me and I let
the multi-tasking overshadow that value.
There was another more selfish thing that I noticed
multi-tasking was stealing from me.
In late 2021, I came over here to dig up an old blog post for a friend.
Behind the scenes at blogger, you can see dashboards
that reflect activity and I took a peek at some stats while I was here.
For years, I averaged a blog post every 2 weeks.
In 2021, I didn't even have one per quarter.
That couldn't be right, right?
Except the data wasn't lying.
Creativity comes in many forms
but it is an active, councious state.
When you're being creative, you are also
being curious.
Possibility and potential exist there.
So does the risk of failure and a big mess.
To be creative, you have to pay attention.
The minutiae took over my life
and the kind of focus needed to approach something
creative was unavailable to me for weeks on end.
I finally reached the max number of circuses I
could have going at once and saw
the cost of having so many going simultaneously.
Since then, I've been working actively to pare back what I'm focused on
to something that resembles one thing.
Things that I am clear now that cannot be done
without full focus:
Things that require creativity
Things that require active problem solving.
Things I've never done or seen before.
Things that require human interaction or connection.
That's a lot of things right?
It's been confronting how often my mind wanders over
to tasks for me to do that essentially
just distract me from being present.
I am often watching a movie with my family
just to pick up my phone and fall into instagram.
I wander into a mental list of things that I worry about
on a continual loop in regard to my extended family or friends
instead of saying a quick prayer or shooting them a text.
I regularly consider taking a new job or
taking up a new hobbie so that I don't have to focus on
the hard work that is in front of me with this book.
I will likely fight the pull of multi-tasking for the rest of my life.
It's a kind of addiction that tempts me regularly
as an escape from the now.
Much like other forms of sobreity though,
I've found a lot of relief in admitting that this is a
problem and taking steps towards moving into something else.
Much like other addictions, giving it up
has allowed me the gift of presence and a renewed sense of freedom.
I can't help but wonder if the pundits had used freedom
as a benefit instead of efficiency or progress,
whether I might have taken a closer look at what they were saying.
If you're a person who struggles with multi-tasking
or a person who feels strongly that multi-tasking is the way
or just a person who wants to say hi-
I'd love to discuss.
During my scheduled time for doing such things
so I can really hear what you're saying.
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| the patio at cocoa cinnamon |
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