I’m reluctant to give life advice online generally. For one, there’s a glut of that stuff out there – ‘just do this and you’ll be happy’ is sometimes useful, and sometimes frank bullshit. But a conversation with my best friend recently stuck out in my head because we were talking about context switching to get a lot of things done in a day and she told me I was just better at it than other people and I make it look easy.
But that’s not really true in the grand scheme of things – and after we talked through it, I thought it was worth mentioning.
I do get a million things done in a day. Let’s take this past Tuesday for an example. Before anyone else was up in the house, morning being my best time of day, I had put in a run on the treadmill, dealt with laundry, emptied our dehumidifier in the basement (Yay greywater for plants!) started working and made a ravioli lasagna for dinner. Then I had meetings until 4:30 and in between checked on the kids. Eli also keeps them fed and responds to requests but I try to do my part when there’s small breaks between meetings. And then I got dinner on the table by 6, helped with clean up, made sure everyone was set for the evening and folded some laundry. And worked some more.
Some of this productivity is just self-preservation. I do not want to, nor is it in my budget to live on take out. So I have to spend some time on mornings and weekends meal planning, batch cooking and preparing food. I actually really love grocery shopping – I adore wandering the aisles on no schedule in particular and looking at all the things – but because my time is at a premium I treat that as well, a treat. The cost to have groceries delivered is more than offset by things like not having time, sticking to a list (not my greatest life skill) and trying to shop to a meal plan rather than have everything around just in case.
But back to that conversation. What startled me most by it is that this is from a person who knows that it isn’t easy to do a million things and knows that I get tired and still thinks it’s easier for me from the outside.
So is it? I had to contemplate that as we talked and here’s the conclusion I came to.
Context switching is hard. Moving between task and task, switching from a meeting to a creative task to a physical task, from topic to topic is not something our brains do well without a transition period. That’s why on days when I just go from meeting to meeting to meeting on different topics I’m so tired at the end of the day. It’s literally wearying for your brain, and figuring out how to parse time out so that you can get all the things done is work.
But I have a theory that it’s also something you can practice and get better at. But first you have to decide a couple things, and what I mean by decide is not as simple as chicken or fish for dinner. Decide that this is a thing not only that you will do, but you can do. You will do it even if it doesn’t always feel good, takes time to learn but you will do it because this skill – the mental muscle that you will build (that is also sometimes a physical thing too) is to do it anyway.
Take writing. Because I’m up often before dawn, it affords me time to write. Sometimes it’s here on my blog, often it’s more private, but when I am up, I am writing to almost the exclusion of all else except that I also drink coffee. It’s a rare time when I don’t owe anyone anything, and how I choose to use it is to write, then often exercise. I decided I was a blogger. I didn’t decide it was going to make me rich or get me tons of followers – clearly, ha! I just decided I was going to write. And that made me a writer. Someday a book maybe, for now this is enough for me. It gives me joy whether I have 5 readers or 5 million. And so I keep practicing it, hoping to be better.
The same truth is for my running. I am not fast, I do not win races. I just get out there and do it because I really really like who I am when I’m running. So I keep running, even when it doesn’t feel great or I would rather be doing something else, because it’s not just duration that matters but the cumulative process of mental and physical strength that comes from doing something over and over.
So too with the context switching. If you have an hour to be creative, do it. Don’t recite lists of barriers or reasons you can’t. Simply do. Maybe you won’t be good at it for a while, and your brain tells you you need more time. But eventually you’ll find yourself doing it, because you kept at it, because your determination to write or run or learn to make macarons overtakes those barriers.
And then like most of us, your time alloted is done, and you have to move on to the next task. Which you’ve also decided you can do. Parenthood helped me with this, also the work that I do in my head to try to be immersive in where I am – as someone who spends a lot of time distracted by the next things I need to get to, being in the moment is something I’m working on. But when that moment moves on to the next moment, I set it down and move on.
Am I saying everyone should be busy all the time? No. Absolutely not – creativity often comes from giving space – mentally and physically.
But we make time for what we value, even if it takes some moving around, restructuring, and so on. Sometimes you have to try a method out for a while and then try another. But not after 3 days, nope – you give it months. You take the frustration and the not-good-at-itness and you sit with that. You embrace it. Eventually the discomfort becomes something else.
Maybe it will all be joy from the start. But if it’s not here’s my life advice – gut it the heck out. Just.Gut.It.Out. This is not life advice that will win me awards or make friends, but it’s the realest thing I can tell you, and it might just help with the muscle that lets you switch gears more frequently.
What I find is that if you allocate in your mind, you allocate in your life. And then you switch from writing to emails, and that becomes normal. And so on.
I lost half this post when my host froze this morning, and I probably lost some better writing. But then because I had decided I was publishing today, I sat back down after my shower and got it done.
I’d tell you more but now I have to go feed the bunny breakfast and check email.
Little House on the Fairy Hill 