If the past 18 months have taught me anything—combining a pandemic with new parenthood—it’s that multi-tasking is a myth.
Between the stress of new responsibilities and the maddening lack of sleep, my attention span was shredded, and I found that I had to re-prioritize how I focused. For instance, in my previous life, I could maintain the semblance of a conversation while also skimming a news article on phone. That ability to balance objectives—”multi-tasking”—has now vanished. I can either choose to converse with someone or read the article; there’s no in between. Any attempt to juggle the two leaves me uncertain what either the conversation or the article was actually about.
The realization has also changed my computer behavior. Previously, I was the person who always had 32 tabs open in my browser and at least 12 different program windows up and running, a mix of Outlook (including half-finished drafts of emails!), Teams, Word, Firefox (with those plentiful tabs), at least three iterations of File Explorer, InDesign, Photoshop, Word, Excel, Spotify, and maybe even PowerPoint for good measure.
While there were plenty of times when I remained focused on a single task, there were—if I’m honest—probably more times when I would end up zipping back and forth between tasks, pinging between my open windows like a pinball, collecting little jolts of dopamine with each collision.
Now, frayed by the vicissitudes of new parenthood, I’m unable to play that pinball game. When looking at a task, I need to focus on it, or it’s a hopeless uphill battle. I’ve found non-digital tasks to be far easier, like sketching layouts on scrap paper. There’s nowhere else to go. The paper is it! Considering one of Cal Newport’s observations about how we typically use computers pushed me to reconsider my digital tasks:
…the power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.
It was the simultaneity that was killing me. Or, rather, the idea that I was capable of such simultaneity. The pointlessness of multitasking deserves its own post, but I’ve realized the value in a more focused digital workspace instead of my motley crew of attention-sucking windows. (Right now, this WordPress tab in Firefox is all I have open on my computer.) I won’t pretend this makes the work itself easier—writing is as hard as it ever was—but it certainly makes it easier to focus.
Taylor Coe 