AdvanceBlog

One day, I had a couple of hours of one on one time with my then two year-old daughter.  My intentions were to maximize that time as quality daddy-daughter time.  Ironically, while my intentions were to play with my daughter, I found myself texting friends by phone and occasionally glancing at updates on Sportscenter.  Our quality daddy-daughter time was diminished due to my inability to be fully engaged with my daughter.  While being drawn to Sportscenter, I did not notice her walk towards me until I felt her little hands on my face.  My two-year old was doing what I failed to do myself, fully placing my attention upon her.  A two-year old had to remind me of what I should have known all along – that this was our time and that I needed to be fully attentive to her.

In his book, Coming to Our Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn refers to the illusion of multi-tasking as the infidelity of inattention.  How can we actually experience the beauty, the lessons, and the opportunities provided by one thing when we are only partially paying attention to several things?  How can I truly say I spent time with my daughter?   If I quantified or made a pie chart of that time span – some time texting, some time television watching, some time transferring my attention from one item to the next, and some time playing the game with my two-year old – how much time did I actually spend with her?

I once believed there was value in multi-tasking.  I believed I could simultaneously work on reports and have conversations with people in my office.  I believed that could spend time with my children even if I brought them to my work place. I erroneously placed value on driving, talking on one phone, and texting with another phone.  In those instances and more, I was wrong.

The individual tasks were not wrong.  The error was attempting multiple tasks at once.  Just because my children accompanied me as I supervised the youth ministry does not mean I spent time with them.  Just because I called my mother during my daily commute while texting my co-workers, does not mean I was fully engaged in our conversation or that my texts were coherent.  I mistakenly assumed that busy equaled productive. I had actively embraced the illusion of multi-tasking.

Thankfully, nothing tragic had to happen for me to begin to recognize the illusion.  In fact, the understanding came during a lunch conversation with a friend.  She wanted to know about my company and my book.  She is a self-professed career woman who feels woefully inadequate when not accompanied by her Blackberry.  We exchanged initial pleasantries while being seated and she placed her Blackberry on the table.  While I was talking, she held up one finger for me to pause and she answered her phone.  She apologized and told me to resume because she really wanted to hear how things were going.  As I began to explain how things were going, the finger came back and she responded to a text.   A little bothered and speaking with greater reservation, I eventually started talking about the process of writing my book.  My reservation stemmed from not wanting to be interrupted; however, after resuming our talk, she received an email and I got that finger again.  Needless to say that while we were both physically present, we were unable to share much.

While I had heard of the concept, the illusion of multi-tasking began to be more apparent to me after that day. I learned the difference between being fully present and sharing distracted attention.  I learned that despite the multiple avenues for people to stay connected, many of us are less “connected” than we recognize.  When we engage in multiple tasks at once, we actually do a disservice to each of those tasks.  In essence, by attempting so much, we accomplish so little.