Decisive thinking: A cautionary tale

This is not commentary on some disillusioned corporate theory on productivity; so don’t roll your eyes (at least not yet). This is personal; and possibly impacts a lot of us. This does not fall into the family of "systems thinking" or "design thinking" or "critical thinking" or the rest of those fluffy things. This affected me to the point that it compelled me to actually write about it. So bear with me because understanding the why is as important as understanding the what. I may go on a bit of a rant here and take the long scenic route to my point but if you are bothered by demotivation and/or procrastination this might give you some food for thought

[ no miracle solutions here: we make our own journeys to fulfill our potential ]

We have accepted procrastination as some form of everyday comic relief in our lives but when does this stop getting funny? Whether work related or personal; we remember fondly, the times when we finished a critical task right at the last moment and feel like a superstar about it. What's the delay you ask? Well, obviously, you are "multitasking", and suddenly everyone is cool, and you are the absolute coolest yourself. I mean, doing several things at the same time? how utterly productive are you? With your chrome tabs open in a line, so many, that you cannot even see the web page title within the tab. This scene of mass productivity on your screen with your laptop's RAM maxed out with immense data loaded into your browser. You are the boss! your brain is a NASA super computer, you have a hard Ferrari V12 instead of soft neutral tissue in your skull, and you are clearly "multitasking" right??All through the day, all through the night, you are working crazy hard.

Now that begs the everyday question "You must be getting MORE done then… right?"?You obviously know the answer to that yourself; maybe you ARE a superstar and can actually get more done (if this is you, thank you for reading so far; the rest of this may not be of interest to you ?? ), but from what I understand and hear, most of us are just not that lucky; at least not all the time.

But the short-term impact is not what I want to talk about. It is about what happens when you try and make multi-tasking an everyday habit. And why wouldn't you?; I feel like we are all almost force-fed this expectation to develop multi-tasking as a skill if we are to survive in this cut-throat life. The world worships and gives high praise to good multitasking in almost all aspects of life. "Oh, I can read an academic book while watching a movie". "Oh, I'm involved in executing multiple projects at the same time". "Oh, I sit on the board of multiple organizations". "Oh, I can have a conversation with you while thinking about something completely different"; heard that before? And we all know, a person who can play the violin, and sing and dance and cook and drive and knit and fix a car and is a CFA charter holder right? Someone who is naturally considered "multi-talented" and therefore is on a pedestal and also automatically wins at life. I recently found myself watching a new Netflix series about lawyers and they showed someone walking to work, with a colleague, while sipping coffee and while learning about new technical regulations via a podcast. I obviously found that deeply impressive and found myself aspiring to that level of…well, lets call it… “Multi-task-ism”. There is probably an actual aspiring lawyer who watched that show and recognized the immense desire to be the same way.

Now multitasking is all dandy, but are you really giving the due importance to all those things you are doing at the same time? are you sure? really? I mean, you can complete the tasks, but are you doing them well? It is okay to roll your eyes now because I am FINALLY asking the wrong question here because...**yawn** Who cares!? We are deliriously obsessed with multitasking and I am being a fusspot for no reason. Who cares if you remember what you studied after you have given your exam, or who cares if you really immersed yourself in the movie, or who cares if you did not complete all your projects as per your intended standard? or that you really enjoyed talking about the right way to make banana bread with your mother. who cares if a deadline slips, or that the violin you play is just that one melody or that thing you cook is just ramen or that car you fixed was just an oil change. It is a "Tick in the box" and you move on; time is fleeting and you just have to keep moving or you would just get left behind; forgotten. Quantity over Quality! More is better, yaada yaada yaada; the sands of time slipping away and it is as if your throat is the neck in the middle of the hourglass and it is slowly choking you. So dark.. but hey! No big deal! you wont notice it till it is too late anyway. So that is a non-issue and I'll probably rant about it at another time but the key message here is that we can be easy victims to making multi tasking a daily habit.

Has this happened with you? You are scrolling through LinkedIn and you come across a post from your colleague or your friend and you find the title to be kind of relatable and even before reading more in detail, or clicking that link, you just think to yourself that "hey, I should support this person because of whatever" and so you just click that like button without even understanding what that post was actually about. I am ashamed to admit it, but I can be that person at times and I hate that I can be okay with that and be so utterly ignorant and so disrespectful to my own intelligence. Why do I do it? who has got the time? I am checking the box of letting my contacts know that I am attuned with random Ideas and that I am visible. Did I learn anything or add any value to myself or to my colleague's/friend's idea? highly doubtful. It was just an empty gesture. But who cares! time is fleeting, and multitasking awaits me!

Now stop rolling your eyes again, pay attention! because I am finally at my main point. If you have read this article so far, please know that it makes me very happy and am truly grateful for your time. What I am trying to say is.. more than such empty gestures being a disservice to our community, this really is personal and this is about our own selves.

This is about our mental well being and how it impacts the quality of our lives. How it even could mean the loss of memory and can even lead to dementia or Alzheimer's. in the long run.

Harvard, Stanford, UCL, medical journals and so on, they have all done the research and it is no secret that our continuous multitasking has a direct correlation with deterioration of our memory quality. Go ahead, Google it! don't take my word for it. This is about your brain, and you SHOULD spend some time understanding what it needs and ensure that you do not take it for granted. Before you start asking for my medical degree and who my professor at Johns Hopkins was, I will freely admit that my thoughts are based purely on my own experiences and a bit of research. I get it. ?I mean, the journey from multi tasking to dementia sounds pretty extreme right? For those of you who did not start googling, let's break it down to simple logic; and this is the part where I especially need your attention. We are almost through to the rather anticlimactic finale (oops); so, stay with me.

Through multitasking and by not focusing on singular tasks, we are essentially training our brains to discount the various streams of work that you could be attempting simultaneously. In the "task manager" of our pre-frontal cortex, the brain is equally trying to prioritize the tasks at hand and allocating similar mental resources to all tasks which in effect is diluting the importance of both tasks. To clarify, I mentioned the "pre-frontal cortex" (also referred to as PFC) it is the very conscious and explicit part of our beautiful mind which deals with your executive control. This is basically where your Chief Strategy Officer sits. So please try and not confuse passive activities like breathing and talking together as multi tasking. Ill give you an example - a pretty common and a rather underappreciated one. Texting and driving! yay! It is no secret that the moment when you are texting and driving, you have considerably increased your chances of getting into an accident. But to your simple and honest brain, it is in awe observing that you are risking your dear life and defying the goal of self preservation to simply text "ill be there in 15 mins, stuck in traffic" or just some other witty remark to someone you probably don’t even like very much. It is YOU who are in control of setting priorities and your brain is trying its best to cope and provide you with the neural resources you need; but at the same time (**emphasis needed here**), your subconscious, ah yes, your “SUB”conscious (Yep, it really is a real thing) is learning from your behaviors and forming passive habits to help you cope even better the next time to decide to put your life on the line again to look up a meme on your phone. Your poor brain simply cannot perceive the individual value of your priorities.

So let's quickly recap what is happening in the background when you resort to multitasking: 1) You are less likely to give adequate attention to the goals

2) Your brain perceives your tasks to have equal value and hence is less likely to be responsive to urgency

3) Your brain comes under strain when you expect it to help you perform multiple tasks at the same time.

When all these things come together, you can end up missing your goals, while also feeling a very false sense of productivity with a brain that is often exhausted. Once you do such things over and over again (say, over the course of your highly demanding career) the brain develops this as a habit and your pre-frontal cortex also gets used to this.

How frustrating is it to feel that you tried so hard but still ended up missing your goals?

THIS is the moment where your subconscious is there to help you cope and from my experience, this is usually where one can be susceptible to procrastination or what I like to call “auto-piloting” (And this is the part that I HOPE you can relate as well). You could have a slight mental block while solving a problem and your subconscious becomes quite eager to take over for you to "give you a break" because apparently, you earned it with all the multitasking you have been doing right? And you are only too happy to hand over control to your subconscious. Your prefrontal cortex willingly hands over the keys to the endorphin vault and before you know it, you are scrolling through social media and watching YouTube and catching up on your messages - feeling good and feeling far away from the realities of life. What felt like 5-10 mins was just a whole 60 mins! How is it logical that you were doing a bunch of important tasks sometime ago and you kind of randomly left them in between to scroll through short funny clips? I admit, the reasoning at the backend for everyone can be different; fear of not doing well; fear of not making an impact or just plain “burnout” as well I guess (Yes, yes, I am not a psychologist either). This could all very well take a big chunk of overall motivation and energy away from you. At the end of it all, you are spending much more time in finishing your tasks and feel as if you have been working around the clock; you could still finish off your tasks in time, but the experience has drained you much more than it should have, and the satisfaction is not that pronounced either. This is just the short-term impact though, the real trouble looms in the long term as your mind becomes used to disregarding the present and always being somewhere else paving the path to the downsides I mentioned earlier. One could argue the harmful effects of screen time in isolation as well but I believe our minds will eventually find distractions in any form.

I must clarify that the problem is NOT that you’re taking a break. That is not what I am saying at all. Not everything we do in life is supposed to be "productive" and value adding. We are human beings FIRST and we should be able to enjoy ourselves whenever we want. BUT, and this is the biggest BUT in my whole long rant here; we should make A VERY CONCIOUS DECISION to do so and not do it as part of some passive coping mechanism or a program pre-set by your “auto-pilot”. We should be able to look at our phones, or step out, or call a friend or play a videogame or watch a video because we CONSCIOUSLY intended it so. This is where the term “DECISIVE THINKING” came to my mind, which actually as it turned out, was a more action-oriented twin sister to the term, exercising “MINDFULNESS”. Forget all the fluffy stuff; I believe there is a simple self-check that one can do to start re-disciplining their subconscious. Whenever you feel like you’re going off track, just quickly ask yourself if what you’re thinking in that moment, is what you had intentionally “DECIDED” on; and does that thought coincide with the task you are performing at that time. I realized that, especially when am engaged with a procrastinate-y task, and I frisk my brain with that annoying query, it immediately brings me back to the present and helps me recalibrate my priorities and push my mind out of its “auto-pilot” state. This advice might seem silly to some, but I hope that at some level, we all agree that our minds are extremely complex and it does not hurt being “decidedly” aware about what it is up to. (I’m sure you can make a list of all the things your brain does autonomously with zero input from you)

If all that I have written down here, makes sense to you and you can relate to it; I want you to know, I absolutely feel and do understand the frustration of feeling overwhelmed by all our duties and tasks and how we may resort to procrastinating through it as temporary relief.

You NEED to know, that none of this is your fault and you have only been trying to be all that you can be.

However, you must exercise caution in how you apply the mind to achieve your goals. Your current and future quality of life depends on it. Multitasking should be applied in moderation, and we should seek to appreciate the finer details of our experiences one task at a time. What has happened in the past and what can potentially happen in the future is irrelevant; take control of your present and stay in the moment. Do not take your mind for granted. I promise that the strength is within you to retake control.