Multitasking (2):
Eradicating the blight
 Dear <$salutation$>
The sign of the times?
...Banks collapsing?
Or how about a bunch of tourists, oblivious to the fragrant beauty
of Granada’s Generalife gardens, absorbed in texting?
That’s where we were last newsletter. Everywhere technologies crowding in and human wit crowded out. Social interaction wrecked as geeks
(yes that’s us now) fidget with techno-toys.
I even hear of business meetings turned into BlackBerry users’ conventions. This is rude and unintelligent and I suggest declaring meetings mobile-free zones: people throwing tantrums get fined.
But we shrug and say ‘it’s the job’. Really? Are these the busy professionals who tell me they’re dying of trivia overload? Shouldn’t the job be effective action to meet core goals in business and life?
But the obnoxious technological imperative can be beaten.
- My own solution is Blended Living™: reconciling conflicting issues productively - not multitasking but transforming problems into opportunities. Killing two birds with one stone. You don’t for instance take your children into work on Saturdays if you’re writing a report – but you might if you’re counting paperclips.
- Discover what psychologists call flow – that glorious mastery of a single activity. Where the consummate control exercised by a musician or dancer makes time stop. Indeed balancing a set of accounts used to do it for me.
- So you can’t match Pavlova in Swan Lake. But does a colleague display intelligent single focus? Or a friend? Emulate them - and don’t assume you can’t learn from youngsters.
- Go – proactively - with the flow. Technology won’t disappear. Agrarian society changed with the industrial revolution: our post-industrial lives must change likewise.
- Understand your preferred learning style. And then leverage it – on the job or in the classroom. Most of us never learnt about learning styles or techniques at school or university. Here’s your chance to bring your skills into the 21st century.
- Learn from me about mindfulness as I learn it from my own coach. Mindfulness teaches that awareness is more than being simply awake (‘I’m sorry – I was miles away!’). It is a constant focus on awareness, more ‘mind over mind’ than ‘mind over matter’.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
JOHN MILTON: Paradise Lost
Improve your game by nurturing intelligent, focused attention rather than task switching. These solutions help postpone the dark day IT governs us completely – while relieving stress!
Way back at the dawn of the techno-age, Umberto Eco noticed the error of assuming your mobile was empowering. He pointed out that, with a mobile, you were in fact on call 24/7!
For more help with any of these solutions, just email me at info@worksmarktplayhard.co.uk.
I'm here to help!
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