One of my rituals for each new year is to choose a word to influence me for the year. My word for 2011 is EXPERIMENT. To support my EXPERIMENTAL focus, I commit to post the results of a new experiment each Sunday of this year.
This week I chose not to multi-task. For me this meant:
no cooking or eating while watching TV;
no talking on the phone while doing ANYTHING else;
no surfing Facebook while fast forwarding through the recorded Idol results show;
no finishing Cheap Therapy work while watching recorded Letterman episodes;
no texting while in conversation with/company of anyone;
no checking e.mail or surfing the web in ANY way while in conversation with/company of anyone;
and no placing or receiving phone calls while in conversation with/company of anyone.
You get the point.
Since I don’t own a smart phone, I thought this would be easy. Not so much. I DID make it though.
My biggest realizations were that:
- I use TV as white noise too often (duh, did I remember NOTHING from last week?!);
- I can stop recording several of the shows I’ve been recording because when I actually WATCHED them – they suck;
- people are much more interesting when I give them my undivided attention;
- I made fewer mistakes when only doing one thing at a time;
- my priorities became clear;
- everything that HAD to be done got done;
- and I need to work on the Judge inside me because after just a week of NOT multi-tasking, I think YOU should ALL give it a try :).
What do ya say?
PS ~ now that I’ve written this blog, I’m off to enjoy a piece of homemade key lime pie WHILE WATCHING a show I recorded last night. Hey, I’m mindful, NOT maniacal.
Lisa’s Cheap Therapy blog 
Another experiment of yours I definitely need to work on. Sometimes I feel like I’m just mentally “skimming” everything because I’m doing/think about so many different things at once. I hope I’ll be better about this now since I’m finished with grad school(!) and then I can really focus on this in a few weeks when school (and everything else) winds down.
I’m reading this while watching Pres. Obama on 60 Minutes. Thanks for waking me up to what I’m doing.
Buying a laptop, useful as it is, moved me to a new level of multi-tasking that seems awfully hard to turn back from.
Every Sunday, you give me something new to think about.
Thanks a lot!
I am hoping to do less multi-tasking this summer!!! I know I need to “slow down” at work, but it has been so crazy and I’m trying to do three things at once most working hours so its worse.
Last week, I had a colleague ask me how I keep the candle burning at both ends without being frazzled. I laughed and said I had been doing it for so long, I couldn’t remember any other way.
Your experiment “V-8ed” me (you know the feeling from the V-8 commericals – slap yourself on the forehead and say “I could have had a V-8) and made me realize it is time to work on the balance in my life.
THANKS!!!!!!
PS-How was the key lime pie AND tv??? 🙂
I also have to admit….trying to eat strawberries while grading final exams actually slowed me down. I did much better once I took the time to enjoy eating the berries and then went back to focusing on exams.
And for the record: My Spring 2011 grading is complete!!!!! 🙂
Rachel, hope you get some ‘single focus’ time soon.
Amma, you made me LOL!
Judi, YAY YOU!
thanks, ya’ll…