A Good Kind of Disruption
I might not have noticed if I hadn’t accidentally hoarded my vacation days resulting in an extra long winter break. Aside from a bit of work on Think Kit I spent far less time at a computer since I don’t know when. Whatever work and thought patterns I’d developed were wholly disrupted by excesses of lounging, family time and movie-watching.
Sore Thumb Multitasking
And thank goodness. Otherwise, it may not have seemed so weird on returning to work when my brain instantly switched to that internet-fueled multitask mode – you know, the one when you have one eye on tweetdeck and incoming email while you’re knee deep in a project.
That first day back, I didn’t sit at my desk to work straight away. Instead, I stopped in the main room to flip through the newspaper. In came a co-worker to chat up the holidays. As we shared stories of our break, I couldn’t stop thumbing though the paper. All the while – my thought process: “Wow, this is really odd. Why am I flipping through this during our conversation…” until the inevitable lost train of thought.
A-ha! That was weird, huh?
Routine multitasking of internets and inboxes would have felt like the normal business of getting back to work. This multitasking was just plain weird, so I had a greater awareness of the shift in my brain. I noticed the fogginess, the slower processing, the not-quite-grasping any one thing as fully as I might with a more singular focus. It became obvious that despite the gross inefficiency of chronic multitasking, I was hard-wiring my brain to work this way, even when it didn’t matter.
Frankly, it scared the hell out of me. I wonder if I can break this bad boy, and if so, how much more I’ll accomplish?