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| A Small Step |
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| To Kick Our Multi-Tasking Habit |
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| Boone Pickens perhaps said it best: When you are hunting elephants, don’t get distracted chasing rabbits. |
This week’s rabbit: Stranger Things.
I’m not a TV watcher by nature, but every now and then, a show will grip Markus or Max so tightly that it becomes a focal point for conversation after conversation, theories and recaps and findings passed around the dinner table with the mashed potatoes.
The show sounded fascinating enough, even without the 80’s factor and the Indiana plot and of course Winona’s hair. And this is precisely how I wound up staying up waywayway past my bedtime last Saturday night hitting Play on Season 2.
I have been searching for pockets of time to hit Play ever since.
Earlier this week, while I needed to make dinner, so I chopped cauliflower while watching Joyce Byers trash her own house again, and of course, it wasn’t twenty minutes before a pot of spaghetti was bubbling onto the stove and I still hadn’t figured out where the heck Hopper was.
I turned off the TV, realizing there were enough rabbits for me to chase without adding a virtual one to the mix.
And so, a small reminder for myself, courtesy of this simple trick my therapist friend shares with his patients:
Pay attention to your hands.
It’s the perfect cure for multi-tasking, he says. When you’re writing an email, watch your fingers on the keyboard. When you’re folding laundry, watch your hands sort through the whites. When you’re at the park with your children, pay attention to your hands pushing them in the swing, brushing a leaf from their hair, holding their bike helmet as they run wild in the grass.
When I do (or think of doing) a million things at once, I do them less well. When I multitask, I'm teaching my brain to distract itself and things just take infinitely longer, my fuse growing infinitely shorter.
But there’s something inherently lovely about single-tasking, about focusing on just one thing at a time for as long as we’re able. And it turns out, I only need to retrain my brain with what I already have available: our hands.
It’s a small trick that snaps my mind back to the present and – better yet? – preserves energy for my next task.
(Like hitting Play on Stranger Things the very second those little dishes are done.)
