Continuing with this theme, because it seems to be working:
Multitasking versus shifting I have been thinking about multitasking for quite a while now. I am a very good multitasker, and much of the time it seems to work for me. I have a good time doing it and I have periods that seem very productive.
On the other hand, I’m well aware that (a) I also have periods that are not very productive, and (b) multitasking is not considered best practice by the people who are most expert in this kind of work. They tend to be advocates of ‘do one thing at a time and focus on it deeply’. That seems boring to me and I don’t enjoy it or get much done when I try to practise it, but on the other hand my experience in life has almost always been that when I disagree with the specialists, they turn out to be right and I turn out to be wrong.
So I’ve been sitting with this one for a while.
This week’s breakthrough came courtesy of a US Army presentation on attention and leadership. (I can’t reference it here, sorry.) They hold a very useful distinction: “multitasking versus shifting”. Multitasking is doing more than one thing at once. Shifting is doing one thing at a time and focusing on it alone, but it’s okay to move between activities rapidly. The thing to avoid is diluted focus.
So I’ve been practising shifting. Work for five minutes, paying conscious attention, then piss around on the Internet, paying conscious attention. It works. It’s more productive than multitasking, because there’s more consciousness involved. It’s not as boring as focus, because I know that I can stop working and piss around on the Internet any time I like.
I suspect it’s a pretty good first step on the journey from multitasking to actual focus. And it’s one that I’m willing to take.
Self-care and balance October was quite a difficult month for me, so I stepped up all the healthy activities. Lots of meditation. Lots of writing. Lots of asking for help – and lots of giving attention to helping others, so that I’m not trapped inside my own head. Et cetera. And of course I couldn’t keep that up for any length of time, so for about the last ten days of October I did pretty much none of this stuff.
And I wasn’t really worse off.
This is counter-intuitive, especially for someone who is evangelical about self-care. So I’ve been thinking a bit about what’s going on there.
I think the thing is that self-care should be caring. What I was doing isn’t caring. An hour of meditation sounds great on paper, but if one is relatively inexperienced at it (as I am) then it is a chore. An hour of meditation every day for three weeks is a lot of chore, and a lot of chore uses a lot of energy.
What I was doing, essentially, was using self-care to try and manage my state. It stopped being care and became homework. Also, that doesn’t work. Using meditation (or, indeed, anything) to try and avoid painful feelings is actually not very different from using alcohol or sugar (or television or shopping or anything) to avoid painful feelings. Meditation works when I become willing to accept and surrender the painful feelings and just be with them as they are. Which I can do, but not yet for an hour. So the meditation became a struggle, which is the opposite of what it is meant to be.
I think a good model for self-care is the inner child. It’s a bit naff – I cringe a bit when it comes up – but I think it’s a very good way to work with this kind of stuff. If I were to say to myself ‘what does the child inside you need, in the way of self-care’, it would not be ‘two and a half hours of difficult work a day’. It might be ‘ten minutes of meditation’. That would probably, ironically, have done a lot more for my well-being than the full hour.
The answer to the child question is never self-indulgence. Children don’t need chocolate and they don’t need to be stuck in front of the telly all evening and they don’t need new dresses and they surely do not need alcohol. But it isn’t self-improvement, either, because children are best off when they learn that they’re okay the way they are. Not perfect, but okay. Which is bringing me – as I write – to a new distinction: between self-improvement (not IMHO a great way to engage with the world) and learning (brilliant and necessary). Ten minutes of meditation could be learning. An hour, at this stage in my practice, is definitely self-improvement.
So right now I’m trying for balance. A bit of the healthy stuff every day, and a bit of the fun stuff every day. Something of everything and not too much of anything. We’ll see how it goes.
Meaning and purpose This is a bit of a cheat third thing, but I am really very keen to be in the habit of writing regularly again and this is what’s in my head right now. I’ve been doing college reading about meaning (in life) and purpose, and I’m thinking about the difference between the two. So far the most interesting suggestion has come from Alison, who suggested that purpose has direction – that it’s going somewhere – whereas meaning doesn’t have to. But I am still playing around with it, and I would really love to hear any thoughts about how they are different (or indeed similar) to you.
November 2, 2011 at 9:08 am |
I think I agree with Alison.
Where it is useful to
My career has purpose for me. I want it to go somewhere. It matters to me that it does.
Improv has meaning for me. I don’t want to make my living doing improv*.
It’s very important to me but it’s not carrying me anywhere. I want to be good at improv because being good at improv is a worthwhile thing.
There are layer to this.
It matters to me that I’m good at my job because I derive a lot of self-respect from being good at it and a lot of self-assurance from the respect I gain from my status. So, that’s a part of my career that has meaning. Being a good improviser means I can parley that status into being part of a my wider community which is a purpose.
*That would be lovely but the arithmetic and risk management don’t work out to well.
November 2, 2011 at 9:09 am |
Thank you.