Multi-tasking? More Like Attention Shredding!

In my former life as a retail manager, I don't think I ever spent more than 90 seconds on a given task.

We were expected to do several things at once. Walk the sales-floor. Monitor the conversations staff had with customers. Coach them to sell more, suggest additional items, "build the basket". Run the schedule, which was written in 15 minute blocks, to make sure all areas of the floor were covered. Ensure that everyone got their allotted breaks. Run a cash register when there was no one else to cover a break. Assist customers when no one else could. Respond to complaints, and step in when a customer was unhappy about store policy. Listen with empathy, propose a solution, recover the sale. Straighten up displays and clean up messes. Respond to emergencies and disasters. ("Hey boss, someone stuffed diapers into the ladies' room toilet and it's flooded again.") Keep an eye out for shoplifting and other suspicious behavior. Check in deliveries in the receiving bay, even though this took us away from everything else we were meant to be doing. Email the district manager with sales and conversion data.

Sure, we had a few dedicated chunks of "project time" to dedicate to administrative tasks. When there was more than one manager in the building, we were meant to write those schedules, respond to emails from the district manager and corporate office, compose tough-but-fair performance reviews for the staff that would satisfy the legal worries of the HR department, administer those reviews, schedule interviews with applicants, conduct those interviews, plan for the execution of special events, contribute to the store's social media presence by posting to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and oh-yeah, coordinate the receiving, shelving, and merchandising of 100-200 cartons of product a day while smoothing the ruffled feathers of the tiny staff we had at our disposal.

The biggest of these tasks was the scheduling. I usually ended up doing it from home, "off the clock" and on my own computer, in gross violation of company policy. "You've got to do that in the office," the district manager would say, "and you cannot go into overtime. You've just got to multi-task." Scheduling was supposed to take four hours a week. At work it took eight, but I could get it done at home in two, listening to my own music and drinking a glass of wine.

I get where the pressure to multi-task came from. When sales drop and a company can't show the quarterly growth that investors demand, payroll is the first thing to slash. Things got worse when the "Affordable Care Act" went through. Because it required companies to offer health care to all full-time employees, most corporations responded by eliminating all their full-time positions. (They didn't slash many of the corporate office jobs, though.) We were left with a small staff of minimum-wage workers who didn't have the time to learn or develop their skills. More tasks fell onto the management team. And there were a lot more tasks, since corporate went into overdrive with a let's try everything and see what sticks mentality.

Well, I did it. I did it for eight years, and left on good terms. I survived and I'm here to tell you, multi-tasking does not get more done. It leaves you bitter, exhausted, and depressed.

Lots of research has come out over the past several years to show that multi-tasking is counterproductive. Psychology Today explains that the very term "multi-tasking" is a lie. Our brains can't handle more than one task at a time, and what we're really doing is "task-switching." This switching is expensive. It "uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, running down the same fuel that’s needed to focus on a task". So by running the staff in this way, we were getting less done, and feeling worse doing it.

The term "focus" got thrown around a lot at our weekly management meetings. "Focus on getting the merchandising done, but don't lose focus on the customers. And social media has to be a big focus, because corporate's really focusing on the events coming up this weekend..."

The pedant in me wanted to start a conversation about the meaning of the word focus. You can't focus on everything at once. Couldn't we just acknowledge that focusing on one thing tends to make the other things a little...blurry?

But you don't last for eight years in a major corporation by speaking your mind. We'd all nod our heads to indicate our renewed resolution to focus, and then we'd focus on one thing for 90 seconds, and then another thing, and then another.

I felt like a drunk dad with ADD and a remote control, flicking through the channels for eight hours a night. I can't remember much of what happened, but at least I got paid for it.

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Now I'm worried about whether I can get my focus back. According to a study done by the University of Sussex in the UK, persistent multi-tasking can actually alter the structure of the brain. "They found that high multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control.."

Now that I've stepped out of that hyper-stimulated maelstrom and into a more bucolic life, I've definitely noticed a lot of changes in my own mind. It takes me ages to come up with an idea for an article, and hours to put the pieces together into a coherent statement. (Maybe I never really succeed.) Doing research on the computer is a challenge, since each new tab and search brings up so many new flashing banners and icons to click on, multiplying potential avenues of distraction into the millions.

But that's when I manage to sit still long enough to work. At the same time, ordinary household tasks have become a challenge. I'll head out into the kitchen to refill my coffee cup in the morning, notice a few dishes on the counter, wash one or two, realize I need to launder the dish towels, go outside to shake the crumbs off, look across a lawn that's getting shaggy, and then find myself on the lawn tractor at sunset with no recollection of how I got there.

I guess I spent the damn day multi-tasking.

I view Steemit as an opportunity to un-learn this behavior. There's the temptation, with so much stuff coming up on the feed, to open dozens of tabs and skim. Maybe I've even got a tiny bit of sympathy for those users who post replies that don't have anything to do with what they presumably just read. Just a tiny bit of sympathy. I've stuck my foot in my mouth a couple of times, sharing a clever and helpful observation only to discover that the author stated the same thing up in the second paragraph of their post. D'oh! I must have been multi-tasking again.

I've vowed to slow down, skip the stuff I'm not honestly interested in, and read, slowly and closely, the stuff I aminterested in. The other part of this is accepting I can't read it all - not even all the good stuff. And that's okay. It's not like I have to submit a quarterly report of "posts read" to a district manager somewhere.

The potential for genuine, meaningful interaction on here is too valuable to squander in haste. I've met so many fascinating people already, and a hell of a lot of good writers.

As for my own posts, they take as long as they take. One a day seems to be the upper limit. That's okay, too. 90% of writing, it seems, is getting your butt in the chair and keeping it there. This is why the other skill I'm trying to recover is the hardest of all - the ability to sit still and stare out the window until I've got something to say.

Uh oh. The lawn out there's starting to look a little shaggy again.