Thinking about Multitasking while Drinking Coffee, Instagramming, Reading

Feeling so overwhelmed lately with ideas. This is better then having completely passive and dull thoughts, but it can also keep you in a constant frazzled state that tends to be unproductive and unsuccessful in finishing one task.

Our minds are crazy places and have slowly been taught to not only focus on one task at hand, but oh, about 1 million. We multitask like crazy and are usually never found just sitting quietly working on one project. In life if I were to tell people, “Sorry I’m focusing on this right now, we can talk in a couple hours,” it wouldn’t work.

I actually have felt pleased that I have gotten better at multitasking through the years, but I realize I may quite possibly be going in the wrong direction. We are programmed to constantly be working on hundreds of things at one time but aren’t doing these projects any better and not putting the proper thought into them.Even when I’m “relaxing” I’m multitasking. Why relax only watching a movie when you can relax while watching a movie, texting a friend, reading a blog post and sipping some wine?

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So how does this affect us?

• Dr. Jordan Etkin, a professor at Duke University, explains that when we have multiple goals that conflict in interest, we feel more anxious and feel that the tasks are more difficult. So then we are left feeling like we have too many projects and too little time.

• Dr. Paul Hammerness and Margaret Moore discuss how multitasking increase the chance of making small mistakes and missing something important that you would otherwise note. They explain and promote “set shifting” where you consciously put away a task and then shift to the other task at hand if you need to change tasks.

• Nicola Persico explains that its best to do tasks in a sequential order so that you can complete something rather then having dozens of projects, all incomplete.

Some interesting quotes on multi tasking —

• Multitasking arises out of distraction itself.
• Multitasking means screwing up multiple things at once.
• I can’t tell if it’s killing me or making me stronger.
• Multitasking is NOT a skill.

Just during writing this post, I have wanted to do many many things, like: go order a coffee, text my friend, check if my email went through, oo have any cute pictures been posted on instagram, etc. Sheesh! This is going to be a tough habit to break but I am going to at least test it out and see what happens.

How do you focus long enough on one idea before you want to start pursuing the other?