Multi-Tasking
“The
older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.”
Leonard
Cohen
My
friend, Anna, and I were talking yesterday about a book she's reading
titled, The Organized Mind by Dr. Daniel J. Levitin. According
to him, our pace of life has outstripped our brain development. In
other words, there's just too much data coming in and being held in
our neurons for us to function optimally. Yes, even our young people,
who seem to triple-task at all times, do not have the ability to
concentrate on more than one thing at a time. It seems anti-climatic
to see it in print that we are in fact forgetting things; losing
keys, burning food we forgot was in the oven, leaving our shopping
list on the bathroom sink and not realizing it until we are hip-deep
in Costco. And, it has almost nothing to do with age.
When
we consider that a century or so ago, we were still mostly an
agrarian society, with the industrial revolution coming into its own,
we realize the distance we've come in a short time. At least on the
surface of things, that's progress. But the technological age, and
the shift in capitalism from providing necessities and services to
members of our community, to providing cash to investors first, has
eroded the simple life. It's the equivalent of going from the horse
and buggy to the space age in one hundred years—which, of course,
we did. But our brains did not—at least not yet.
I
don't know about you, but I still hate menus on phones. “If you
know your party's extension, you my enter it now. If you need the
company directory, press one or enter the first three letters of
the person's last name. If you want to pay your bill or get a recent
statement or, or, or...” It is usually at this point that I lose
it. I have listened to an interminable list of options, none of which
is what I am calling about, and we've gone through all the numbers on
the phone. I miss humans answering, and asking, “How may I help
you?” Life was so much easier then.
Long
story short, it is this difficult calculation, this enormous bulk of
data storage that is causing our memory banks to crash. The ones
inside our heads, not on our cell phones. Life has indeed sped up.
There is too much to know and retain, and that alone is creating
untold stress. Rather than slowing down, and concentrating on one
thing at at time, we take a pill and keep pushing.
Clearly,
I am not in charge of the world, but I want to recommend something.
Today, take some deep breaths, and allow yourself to focus on one
thing at a time. At the end of the day, you may find that you have
accomplished more, and the quality of it is better than if you had
tried to multi-task all day. Give your poor brain a break. Don't ask
it to do the impossible.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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