How to stop multitasking and start living

Dear reader,

I have a hunch that any two-minute interaction tells you everything you will ever know about your relationship with someone.

It might take two decades to comprehend, but it’s all there.

Take multitasking, for example. The most mundane of interactions.

***

When does a triple-positive make a negative?

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “Remember that we need to convert from inches and pounds to metric when we calculate the Mars Climate Orbiter’s path using acceleration data.”

Engineer at Lockheed Martin: “Yeah yeah yeah.”

Do you hear it? It sounds like a “yes” but it’s a “no.”

Exact translation, “Please hear a ‘yes’ so I can leave now. I feel you have already told me everything I need and I don’t know why you’re still talking to me.”

I wasn’t there in the room during the design phase of the NASA Mars Orbital Lander that crashed in 1999 at a cost to NASA of $125 million, plus opportunity costs.

But it’s clear what did it in. The engineers knew that they had to convert units when they used the acceleration data. They forgot to do it when it mattered. They didn’t pay attention.?

They were multitasking.

I never multitask. How rude!

We all know the signs of the person on the conference call whose attention is somewhere else. Speaks their piece but barely reacts when others do. Misses key concepts. Repeats same topic on next call.

I never do stuff like that.

Did you believe me?

You shouldn’t. I love tidying up the wood shop while I’m on the phone. Or going for a walk and marking trees. After years of doing this on the phone with my mom, she mentioned one day how rude she found it. And maybe she’s right. But for me, I find that moving my body in a non-thinking way like walking around or emptying the dishwasher can keep me more present.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin became known for his “walk and talk” scenes on the West Wing. It makes his characters’ long dialogues more absorbing.

I don’t want to give up my walk-and-talks.

But I do want to quit my other multitasking.

Yes, there are those conference calls that I’m on where I’m keeping tabs on the conversation with one ear while reading reviews for rock tumbler in another tab. I’m not contributing to a good group experience, or a good experience for myself.

There were years of my life when I wondered if you could program someone’s brain to multitask.

This was around the same time when I wanted to find out why songs could get stuck in my head , and chose a cognitive science major.

I wondered—could you train someone’s brain to be able to hear two conversations at once and fully process both of them?

I didn’t know how to study this. It was a thought experiment. I figured that doing any long-term research on it would damage its subjects.

Why did this fascinate me?

Here’s what I think.?

As Mad-Eye Moody would say, “Constant vigilance!”

Children of alcoholics talk about listening for the heaviness of a parent’s step on the stair.

How mom or dad handles putting the keys in the lock tells you everything you need to know about what kind of evening you are going to have.

Alcohol didn’t feature in my childhood experiences, that I know, but it did for my mom in hers. The universe wants us to heal this kind of stuff and gives us chances to do so. If we’ve been poked and haven’t gotten over the trauma, we put ourselves on the poking end of the stick later in life.?

My parents gave my brother and me life.

My brother and I gave my parents those opportunities to heal. (And we still are.)?

Time is different for kids. There’s a span of my life where I could only guess at my age in numerical terms (perhaps 0 to 8) but could simply be referred to as the Era of the Red Couch.

I don’t know where the couch came from. I don’t quite have the words to describe its plush fabric, its welted edging threadbare. I don’t know where it went after the Era of the Beige Leather Couch began.

But I know how I felt sitting there reading my book, my butt burrowed into the corner seat.

I would sit there and read book after book in that tense 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. hour. The time when my mom was in the kitchen anticipating my dad coming home from the office.

The oven was on to make meat pie, and her emotional thermometer was also rising. Rising for reasons unknowable to a 0- to 8-year-old who couldn’t hear the thoughts in her head. But audible to a child attuned to the loudness of the oven rack’s jangle. Her sighs of exasperation. The anger in her voice told through “Hello, dear” when my dad got home.

The couch is gone, but I remember how it felt to sit on when the argument would break out.?

Like the springs in the cushions that sucked me deeper with each year, the arguments would start with a minor misunderstanding and then escalate fast.

Always on a faulty premise, a misunderstanding I wished I could clear up. My mom didn’t feel embraced by my dad’s family. That was hard considering that my dad and his two brothers had bought what my dad always called a “derelict” old dairy farm together. They each built their family’s home on it, and their parents built their retirement home in the pear orchard next door, with its view of Willard Mountain, and Vermont beyond.

There was bullying and other button-pushing dynamics that kept things riled.

My dad might have asked nothing more than “When is dinner going to be ready?” My mom would respond with an extra loud “Six o’clock” and put a bowl down hard.

His back up but wanting to help, he would ask, “Is something wrong?”

I’m sitting on the couch, my nose in a book, thinking, “Duh. She’s pissed about something. And she doesn’t want to have to explain it to you. She wants to feel understood beyond words. How about acknowledging her feelings and giving her a hug? She doesn’t want to ‘look at it rationally’ right now—she wants you to validate her emotion.”

Kidding. That’s 43-year-old me narrating.

Seven-year-old-or-so me was reading The Little Prince or The Great Brain or The Private Worlds of Julia Redfern. It wasn’t till 26-year-old me read The Five Love Languages and Conscious Loving that I would have words like those.

But I felt, in my child way, that I knew my parent’s “love languages” better than they did. I felt it every single time they mismatched. To our household, each mismatch was, to my mom, about as welcome and met as coolly as a Serena Williams responding to an umpire calling her foot fault in the U.S. Open.

All kids face some situations like this, and learn to cope. And those coping skills can come in handy as an adult. Tuning out lunatics can be another day at the coffeeshop/home/office.

As a society we understand when an engine backfiring can trigger a soldier into panic. They’ve lived under unpredictable mortar fire for months, awakened at all hours.

It doesn’t sound as impressive as an adult to say, “I’m panicking because you spoke sharply to me and won’t be able to think straight for at least an hour. My parents yelled constantly when I was young and I never felt safe.”

I didn’t know that the constant vigilance of one eye on them and one on my book would hurt my brain and my heart so much that my life would be like the mail plane from The Little Prince that would break apart in mid-flight in my 30s and leave me in a desert.

But vigilance is a sub-program you run in the background when you feel unsafe. Doing nothing but vigilant behaviors would be OCD. I have that in very specific instances. I really don’t like the digital thermostat in the car to be on an odd number. Please set it to 72°F or 74°F, not 73°F.

I used to have in my life someone for whom I would edit my texts to start each with a lower-case word. I felt smaller and less threatening to her this way.

Reading books gave me somewhere to go when I was running that background vigilance program.

When the school library did a contest to log how many books you read, I blew the other kids away without breaking a sweat. Reading also helped me stem my fear of not being enough . I felt, clearly and for many good reasons, that my existence in itself was not enough to earn me my parent’s unconditional love. (A noticing that was confirmed last year by my mom’s diagnosis of me .)

Reading, learning, studying, being smart. These were ways I found to excel and receive love that in every other way was served up with friction .

As anyone knows who has not healed their taught self-hatred and then tried to feel loved through achievement, that doesn’t work.

You can never get enough when your bucket is full of holes.

But that didn’t stop me from trying. I’ve read thousands of books and articles, learned speed-reading (as well as handwriting analysis), and bought thousands more books that I like to look at and reference.

And there’s nothing harmful about that, just as there’s nothing harmful about adjusting the car heater that someone set at 75°F, down to 74°F. It’s just that when behaviors like that run your life that it’s a problem.

I didn’t know it at the time. But my college-age interest in having a brain that could read two books at once, seems to me today like an expression of never feeling like I was enough. I’ll never read all the books if I go one at a time.

I’ll never hear all the conversations going on around me that impact my safety if I can only hear one. Let’s listen to one in each ear!

***

If my multitasking habit sprang from constant vigilance, I didn’t notice it wasn’t working well till I put it down.

At age 43, I found that a calm heart makes for a calm and open mind . A different flavor of vigilance. One that provides calmer sleep, and also deeper access to intuition.

I propose the following equation. For every degree you can dial down your anxious intuition, your calm, loving intuition has two more degrees of freedom to talk to you. Listen to it!

***

Multitasking means that you have somewhere else you need to be.

Doing slides for the next meeting while sitting mute through the current meeting? Shopping for wool socks because the zoom call’s not important and you’re bored?

It would be right and true for you to be somewhere else. Make a choice of which meeting is more important and cancel the other. Tell your team they don’t need you on this call. Go and walk to the shoe store down the street rather than the online jungle retailer.

But that can take a difficult conversation, and difficult conversations are hard to have .

I didn’t know how, at age 7, to pick myself up off the red couch in the living room. It did not cross my mind to walk up to my mom and dad in the middle of that night’s pre-dinner shouting match.

I didn’t know how to tell them that I needed to leave. That I would go and find a safe spot, with warmth and quiet and a good book to talk to, or maybe a plant. (Or maybe both .)

I’m working on putting these vestiges down. I’ve been canceling and rescheduling a lot of meetings. I feel afraid of doing this sometimes at risk of appearing unreliable.

What I want to tell these people is, “Something else has come up that needs my full attention. I could possibly attend this meeting anyway but my mind would be somewhere else. I owe you the respect to reschedule at a time when I can be with you only.”

I offer people I work with this license, of course.

I have long had a policy that if someone says they have somewhere else to be, listen to them.

Good day,

Tristan

Quill Nook Farm

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