This blog is really just me talking to myself. I have this conversation with myself often and this issue is one of my biggest challenges. I don’t think I’m the only one with this challenge so I thought I would share my thoughts and let you hear me talking to myself. I am a type A, overachieving, professional multi-tasker!!! Seriously, I could teach a class on “How to Multi-Task”. There has been tons of research done on multi-tasking and most of the results have not been very positive. The findings show that people that mutli-task really don’t get that much more done because they are trying to do so many things at once that they usually mess up most of the things they are trying to do and have to go back and re-do. If that’s one thing I really dislike it’s re-dos!!! I don’t want to waste my time re-doing something, even if I’m the one that messed it up. So, I’ve decided they were just doing their research on the wrong people! Had they done their research on me, they would have found a type A, overachieving, professional multi-tasker that gets it right almost every time the FIRST time. What the research doesn’t show is who pays for my multi-tasking abilities? I have read to my son since he was a baby every night before he goes to sleep. When he started school, he started reading to ME before he went to bed. If we are reading a book for school, he has to do all the reading because that’s his homework, not mine. But if we are reading a book for pleasure, I thought it would be a neat idea if we took turns reading; he reads a page then I read a page. My thought was this would give us some interaction and hold both of our interests from page to page. What usually happens is since I am a professional multi-tasker, I am doing something else while he is reading his page. I might be filling out his school lunch form, or checking his homework, or on my Blackberry checking emails and texting. By contrast, when it is my turn to read, he sits patiently listening, doing nothing, just being in the moment and absorbing the details of the story. One night as I was reading my page, he took out a play cell phone and started “texting”. When I asked him what he was doing you’ll never guess what he said??? His answer was “I’m multi-tasking Mom” Wow!! Here’s your sign!!! Since that night I have tried really hard to focus my attention on the moment. I never knew how hard that would be.
Many “successful” individuals will tell you the way they became successful was by following a to-do list every day. Since I am a professional multi-tasker that means I have a time allotted for all of the things I need to do and if I get interrupted, that means I can’t get everything done or I have to stay up until mid-night doing it because I had a “counseling session” with my daughter or a “life lesson” with my son. When did completing our to-do lists become more important than the moments we have with our families? At the end of the day when I reflect back on the events of that day I always find moments when I wished for a “do over”. I want to be able to go back and just STOP and BE IN THAT MOMENT. As I said, this is something that I have struggled with for a long time and it is something that I do try to improve upon. But I have to make a conscious effort to “be in the moment”—I have no problem being in several moments all at once (lol) but when it comes to concentrating on just that ONE fleeting moment, I have a difficult time. I do feel I have made progress in this area, when someone is talking to me and I find myself wanting to continue to write or type or text I now try to listen to that voice in my head that says “Stop, don’t do it! Focus on this moment.” A quote that I recently came across sticks in my head at those moments “The greatest gift you can give someone is your time and your attention”.
