Simple Things/ Lang Kenneth Haynes
Multitasking and other modern
diseases
Multitasking and other modern
diseases
Most consider multitasking to be real and necessary — that humans can actually tend to more than one thing at a time. I know. I used to believe it myself.
Fact is that the mind can only devote attention to one thing at a time. It might appear that we’re taking care of several tasks simultaneously, but this is a mere
illusion supported by the speed at which we zip about trying to do too many things within too short a space of time. We resemble unknotted balloons released to
fly frantically around a room. And the truth of the matter is usually that no one is satisfied with the fruits of our labor because the efforts are too fragmented. We
only manage to tie one of little Johnny’s shoes as we glob margarine on the toaster waffle that just popped up while we take a gulp of too-hot coffee from the
automatic coffee maker that was programmed, the night before, to have a fresh cup waiting for us as we dive for the front door like a football player two feet from
the end zone with less than one second left to play. So little Johnny will be uncomfortable and off-balance all day at pre-school because one of his shoes was
tied just right and the other was tied too tightly by his disgruntled teacher who was being a bit passive-aggressive because too many kids were showing up for
school half dressed. She sent text messages to some of the parents to let them know what was on her mind.
Sometimes we have to find the missing shoe, talk with Aunt Bertha on the phone about her latest gall bladder crisis, cajole little Suzie into finishing her
cereal and find change for the bus that you somehow have to miraculously catch in three minutes. It’s nice to know how to keep all these balls in the air.
Problem is that the tendency is to maintain this level of anxiety even when it is not required.
“There isn’t time to do things in a more thoughtful way” you might say. You may very well be right. We’ve adopted hurry and worry as necessary parts of our
days. Some of us feel downright unworthy if we don’t have too much to do. Multitasking is one of several maladies that convince us that it is imperative to go
faster and faster and do more and more even if we don’t know where we’re going and it is clear that we are never satisfied with more food, more clothes, a bigger
car, a better car, a bigger house, another 20 channels to add to the 220 television channels we already have that we flip through frantically with the channel
changer that’s usually hidden somewhere between couch cushions. You know the changer. The one with picture-in-a-picture so you can watch more than one
channel at a time, the menus that you don’t have time to read so you just flip channels, timers, multicolored arrows, buttons with letters on them, buttons with
numbers on them, a couple of power buttons and more multicolored arrows. You don’t even have to slow down to hold the door for the person behind you
because the door opens automatically. Good thing. Who has time for manners? Who has the time or interest to say, “Good morning”?
We’ve developed allergic reactions to all manner of space and feel compelled to fill up empty slots on our calendars with activities. Some of these things
were once considered fun. Others were thought to have been obligatory — like weddings and funerals. The distinctions blur into agenda items. Things to do.
Places to be. Things to get through. The more the better, the faster the better, double-book, triple-book, even quadruple-book. Anything is better than being
present in any given moment. That’s a luxury that can’t be afforded in this day and age. Why bother listening to a single compact disk when you can program
your 5-CD changer to spit out 5 times the music in the order you choose? Who has time to listen to one solitary selection without anticipating what’s coming
next? And CD players are for the tortoises among us. Get an MP-3 player and load it up with hundreds of songs. No. Get one that you can fill up with thousands
of songs. More songs than you can listen to in a lifetime, and it doesn’t matter, anyway, because you lost the ability to savor one note a long time ago.
When my adult kids were children they had a pediatrician who had mastered the art of tending to several people in a way that may have resembled
multitasking. But it wasn’t. He may have had three young and fearful patients in separate rooms with fearful parents but he had the knack of being 100 percent
present with whichever patient he happened to be with at the time. He could just spend a couple of minutes with you but you’d feel that he heard every word
you said and knew everything that could possibly be known about your condition and you would feel extremely confident that whatever he prescribed was the
best possible prescription. When he left the room you’d feel secure and reassured even if the diagnosis was not what you wanted to hear, because although you
knew that he had several other patients, when he was with you he was 100 percent with you. This is a real and rare skill. You know it when you’re in the presence
of it.
Days off feel like days on because they are scheduled to the max. We somehow feel unworthy if we are not constantly doing something, or planning to do
something or tired from just having done something. For example, some use hunting as an excuse to get out in the woods and enjoy nature because it is
somehow uncool or not legitimate to just stroll through a thicket, smell the earth and hear small animals rustling beneath beds of dry leaves. There has to be a
defined purpose. There has to be a goal. Something to accomplish. If we smell the earth it’s just incidental. Schedule six meetings in one day even though
experience has taught you that you will likely only make it to three because of things like road construction, changed schedules and other glitches that are only
made worse by the fact that everybody is committed to juggling too many things which increases the likelihood that if you do make it to your fourth meeting, you
might be the only one in the room because you showed up on the wrong day.
My guess is that the people who appear to be successful multitaskers are not multitasking at all. They have developed the art of being variable speed. They
move fast when they need to and slow down when they don’t need to move fast. It’s called conserving energy. All kinds of energy. That’s why you feel their
presence when they enter a room. They are all there. Undiluted. Unexpurgated. Their essence is exposed and available to share with you in a doctor’s office,
waiting on line in a grocery store or just walking down the street. They are straight coffee with no room for cream. Condensed soup that is to be prepared as is.
No water.
What’s the hurry? Why do we insist on building bridges to get us to nowhere faster? How many of you have had this experience: You’re driving down the
street and another car is riding your bumper. You can see, through your rear-view mirror, that the person is tense and in a hurry. You catch glances of him
pounding his steering wheel and moving his mouth as though he is shouting. You approach a yellow light and stop. He leans on his horn, sticks his head out the
window of his car and shouts obscenities at you. The light turns green and he screeches around you and disappears in traffic. You feel relieved. A little angry
and perturbed but relieved. Several intersections and many minutes later you wait for a light to turn green. The car in the lane to the left of you is driven by the
same person who was tailgating you several blocks back. All he gained were elevated blood pressure, indigestion from the toaster waffle he snatched from the
toaster as he ran out the door of his house that morning, and blisters in his mouth from gulping coffee that was too hot to drink on the run. Untied shoes were not
on his list of worries, though. Loafers are much more efficient. I’d write more but I don’t have the time.
Fact is that the mind can only devote attention to one thing at a time. It might appear that we’re taking care of several tasks simultaneously, but this is a mere
illusion supported by the speed at which we zip about trying to do too many things within too short a space of time. We resemble unknotted balloons released to
fly frantically around a room. And the truth of the matter is usually that no one is satisfied with the fruits of our labor because the efforts are too fragmented. We
only manage to tie one of little Johnny’s shoes as we glob margarine on the toaster waffle that just popped up while we take a gulp of too-hot coffee from the
automatic coffee maker that was programmed, the night before, to have a fresh cup waiting for us as we dive for the front door like a football player two feet from
the end zone with less than one second left to play. So little Johnny will be uncomfortable and off-balance all day at pre-school because one of his shoes was
tied just right and the other was tied too tightly by his disgruntled teacher who was being a bit passive-aggressive because too many kids were showing up for
school half dressed. She sent text messages to some of the parents to let them know what was on her mind.
Sometimes we have to find the missing shoe, talk with Aunt Bertha on the phone about her latest gall bladder crisis, cajole little Suzie into finishing her
cereal and find change for the bus that you somehow have to miraculously catch in three minutes. It’s nice to know how to keep all these balls in the air.
Problem is that the tendency is to maintain this level of anxiety even when it is not required.
“There isn’t time to do things in a more thoughtful way” you might say. You may very well be right. We’ve adopted hurry and worry as necessary parts of our
days. Some of us feel downright unworthy if we don’t have too much to do. Multitasking is one of several maladies that convince us that it is imperative to go
faster and faster and do more and more even if we don’t know where we’re going and it is clear that we are never satisfied with more food, more clothes, a bigger
car, a better car, a bigger house, another 20 channels to add to the 220 television channels we already have that we flip through frantically with the channel
changer that’s usually hidden somewhere between couch cushions. You know the changer. The one with picture-in-a-picture so you can watch more than one
channel at a time, the menus that you don’t have time to read so you just flip channels, timers, multicolored arrows, buttons with letters on them, buttons with
numbers on them, a couple of power buttons and more multicolored arrows. You don’t even have to slow down to hold the door for the person behind you
because the door opens automatically. Good thing. Who has time for manners? Who has the time or interest to say, “Good morning”?
We’ve developed allergic reactions to all manner of space and feel compelled to fill up empty slots on our calendars with activities. Some of these things
were once considered fun. Others were thought to have been obligatory — like weddings and funerals. The distinctions blur into agenda items. Things to do.
Places to be. Things to get through. The more the better, the faster the better, double-book, triple-book, even quadruple-book. Anything is better than being
present in any given moment. That’s a luxury that can’t be afforded in this day and age. Why bother listening to a single compact disk when you can program
your 5-CD changer to spit out 5 times the music in the order you choose? Who has time to listen to one solitary selection without anticipating what’s coming
next? And CD players are for the tortoises among us. Get an MP-3 player and load it up with hundreds of songs. No. Get one that you can fill up with thousands
of songs. More songs than you can listen to in a lifetime, and it doesn’t matter, anyway, because you lost the ability to savor one note a long time ago.
When my adult kids were children they had a pediatrician who had mastered the art of tending to several people in a way that may have resembled
multitasking. But it wasn’t. He may have had three young and fearful patients in separate rooms with fearful parents but he had the knack of being 100 percent
present with whichever patient he happened to be with at the time. He could just spend a couple of minutes with you but you’d feel that he heard every word
you said and knew everything that could possibly be known about your condition and you would feel extremely confident that whatever he prescribed was the
best possible prescription. When he left the room you’d feel secure and reassured even if the diagnosis was not what you wanted to hear, because although you
knew that he had several other patients, when he was with you he was 100 percent with you. This is a real and rare skill. You know it when you’re in the presence
of it.
Days off feel like days on because they are scheduled to the max. We somehow feel unworthy if we are not constantly doing something, or planning to do
something or tired from just having done something. For example, some use hunting as an excuse to get out in the woods and enjoy nature because it is
somehow uncool or not legitimate to just stroll through a thicket, smell the earth and hear small animals rustling beneath beds of dry leaves. There has to be a
defined purpose. There has to be a goal. Something to accomplish. If we smell the earth it’s just incidental. Schedule six meetings in one day even though
experience has taught you that you will likely only make it to three because of things like road construction, changed schedules and other glitches that are only
made worse by the fact that everybody is committed to juggling too many things which increases the likelihood that if you do make it to your fourth meeting, you
might be the only one in the room because you showed up on the wrong day.
My guess is that the people who appear to be successful multitaskers are not multitasking at all. They have developed the art of being variable speed. They
move fast when they need to and slow down when they don’t need to move fast. It’s called conserving energy. All kinds of energy. That’s why you feel their
presence when they enter a room. They are all there. Undiluted. Unexpurgated. Their essence is exposed and available to share with you in a doctor’s office,
waiting on line in a grocery store or just walking down the street. They are straight coffee with no room for cream. Condensed soup that is to be prepared as is.
No water.
What’s the hurry? Why do we insist on building bridges to get us to nowhere faster? How many of you have had this experience: You’re driving down the
street and another car is riding your bumper. You can see, through your rear-view mirror, that the person is tense and in a hurry. You catch glances of him
pounding his steering wheel and moving his mouth as though he is shouting. You approach a yellow light and stop. He leans on his horn, sticks his head out the
window of his car and shouts obscenities at you. The light turns green and he screeches around you and disappears in traffic. You feel relieved. A little angry
and perturbed but relieved. Several intersections and many minutes later you wait for a light to turn green. The car in the lane to the left of you is driven by the
same person who was tailgating you several blocks back. All he gained were elevated blood pressure, indigestion from the toaster waffle he snatched from the
toaster as he ran out the door of his house that morning, and blisters in his mouth from gulping coffee that was too hot to drink on the run. Untied shoes were not
on his list of worries, though. Loafers are much more efficient. I’d write more but I don’t have the time.