Do you ever get the feeling you are on a shop floor with an unending line of things to-do and never a breather?
Last Thursday, as I hit the end button on my final work call for the day and then checked on the kid’s homework, hustling to get her dinner in order while putting a list of things to do at work the next day, I felt like I was running a one person shop floor, moving across lines at clinical precision, not just sequentially, but in parallel too, as if I had 10 heads to think and 20 hands to do.
That led me to ruminate a bit. About multitasking.
I feel like I have had it wrong forever. The glorification of multitasking hasn’t pinched harder than it does now, in the middle of my Middle Ages.
“Let’s get some steps in”, I tell myself as I walk down the podium on the occasional morning. But but, why waste 45 minutes just walking. Let me also try to sneak in a book to read during then. Or, maybe formulate a response to that email in my head. Or, possibly think of hypotheses to test as part of that initiative. Choices, choices. My mind is a continuously brewing teapot, flavour and fragrance diluted long ago.
There are too many things to be done, all day every day. The personal seeps into the professional, the professional gets absorbed in the inner echelons of the brain. Many days, I think about ordering medicines while analysing an Excel file or preparing for a client meeting while playing Monopoly with the child.
The mind feels over-leveraged, like a credit card that has been stretched too much (I can sometimes be a painful payments nerd like that).
Mindfulness is the mantra to excellence, screams every self help book and LinkedIn post worth its salt. Meditate every morning, avoid negative thoughts, tap the wall two times before leaving home so you can leave all your personal worries behind, chew your food slowly. I have heard ‘em all.
Nothing works. I hate spending so much time chewing food anyway. Cow or what?
After going round and round in circles, this 22nd year of the 21st century may have finally delivered answers into my lap. The Mecca to the mindfulness worry is to do something that isn’t second nature to myself, so all my effort and concentration has to be forced into it. In my case, that’s to avoid anything to do with reading or writing, or storyboarding PPTs, and focus on things that need me to move my body.
“K, K. Push with your thighs, you are using your knees.” Oh alright, I did start running through my to-do list while pilatesing, let me get the lanes of my brain back to focusing on saving my fragile knees. “Don’t keep your shoulders stiff. You are using your wrists, I want you to think of your shoulder blades.” Arrey yaar. I was thinking of a nice caption for my Instagram post, but I guess I should have been thinking of my hard-to-find shoulder blades instead.
So, problem solved? Erm. For 45 minutes a day, I don’t multitask. I can’t. Nothing can move (or at least rightly) in that period without my full mind to the task at hand. Small win, but win nevertheless. And it feels good, strangely so, after years of tom-tomming about multi tasking being my superpower.
So, what do you do to keep your focus? Knitting? Driving? Mandala colouring?
It could be anything really. After all, mindfulness, like success, is personal.
P. S. Views strictly personal. Post doesn’t refer to any organisation that I am currently associated with.