How To Stop Zapping Your Brain For Good

When I was a kid we would often fold up the foil wrappers from sticks of gum and poke them into electrical sockets.  A mild shock (because we didn’t know the straw trick), impressive sparks and a puff of black smoke later, we were on to the next thing we could dismantle, blow up or render useless.

Lately, my brain has felt like that gum wrapper – over and over and over again.  With a growing business, a family that expects groceries and meals to occasionally appear, and other personal ambitions (knitting!!), I’ve got lots of plates spinning on sticks (cue the “Sabre Dance“).  Every time I jump from wobbly plate to wobbly plate, I feel like sparks fly out of my head.

Two things I’ve read lately have helped me calm the mental electrical storm though.  The brilliant Ken Robert writes a blog that I adore, Mildly Creative.  Cath Duncan and I were going to duke it out to decide who gets to be Ken’s biggest fan but I had to concede to Cath when she ‘fessed up to being an ankle-biter. Dangerous, that one…

In Ken’s recent post, Projects and Playgrounds: How to Pursue Multiple Interests and Still Get Something Done, he was speaking directly to me.  What makes Ken so dazzling to me is that he understands (and demonstrates!) the remarkable power of “ease.”  For so long in our culture, we’ve been having this not-so-subtle competition about who can be the busiest, who can work the hardest, who can amass the most stuff.  Then along comes Ken, seducing me with ideas about intentional focus and playgrounds.  And being okay with letting some things be just fun.

I also happened to snag a slim book at the library recently called The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done (yep, that’s an affiliate link to Amazon but I’ll bet your library has it, too).

Dave Crenshaw explains that multitasking doesn’t even really exist.

I sure knew multitasking wasn’t working.  What a relief – and a motivation to change – to learn why.

Our brains are actually doing what he calls “switchtasking,” flailing back and forth from one task to another with lots of energy wasted (i.e. sparks flying!) on the overhead of making the attention switch.  In computer science, we called that “thrashing.”  It was a Bad Thing leading to serious degradation of system performance.

Want brain proof?  Dave suggests an exercise where you time yourself writing the phrase “Multitasking is worse than a lie,”  immediately followed by writing a sequential list of numbers from 1 to 27.  Then, time yourself again as you write the phrase and the list while alternating one letter and one number at a time: “M,” “1,” “u,” “2,” etc.

Bottom line:  it takes twice as long to complete when you are switchtasking as in the one-task-at-a-time case.

Dave’s book caught my breath when he explained the price of multitasking in our personal relationships.  I thought I could read email and answer a question from my son – uh, no.  I thought I could keep an eye on Twitter while making weekend plans with my husband – nope.  Who was really getting the short end?  Not the email or Twitter; they don’t have feelings.  The people that I love were paying the price.  Deeply important relationships were suffering in ways that weren’t even conscious to me.

Was I a bad person for trying to multitask?  Not at all.  I just didn’t know that my brain isn’t built that way – and never will be.

Between Ken and Dave’s inspiration and some painful realizations, I’m changing my ways to stop zapping my brain. I’m orienting my days around one project at a time and I’m enjoying the playgrounds with people who matter, every chance that I get.

How about you? If multitasking is a myth, what does that change for you? To what playground do you want to commit your attention?

Related posts:

1. What If We Stop Trying?
2. Why Your Great Big Brain Won’t Run A Business