What is single-tasking?
Words Emma Vidgen // @emma_vee
Not pictured: TV, also on, but also not really paying attention to TV.
In September we’re launching our first ever Wayward challenge: 30 days of Single-Tasking. You can join the challenge (#30daysofsingletasking) by completing one single-tasking activity everyday.
We’ll be nominating an activity each day through the month and encouraging our community to give it a go. Follow us on instagram and join our mailing list for more details on how to get involved.
THE INSPIRATION FOR #30DAYSOFSINGLETASKING
How often do you set your mind to something, and just do it? I don’t mean the big life stuff, like “learn another language” or “consolidate my credit card debt”, but the less lofty things, the day-to-day tasks that fill our everyday? Eating a meal, doing the washing up, watching TV… but just the one thing, at the one time? If you’re anything like me, the answer is probably not very often.
When I began studying mindfulness meditation, one of the most shocking realisations I had was how rarely I concentrated on doing just one thing at one time. I wasn’t always this way, but as technology has improved and given me with the capability to do two, three or four things at once, multi-tasking has evolved from a skill on my CV into my autopilot, my constant way of being. Doing several things at once is no longer a mode I slip into, but my everyday, default setting.
My computer is a perfect example of this. At any one time I have 10+ tabs open on in my browser. There are at least 20 programs running in the background. Then, when my poor old laptop has the audacity to metaphorically groan and implode (read: freeze) under the weight of all that multi-tasking, I complain about how rubbish and unreliable it is!
At night, watching TV, I find myself reaching for my phone to scroll whilst keeping half an ear and eye on the show – even when I’m really enjoying it. Often, I’ll have my laptop open as well, tinkering away, not really doing anything, but keeping myself just distracted enough to ask, “Who was he, again?” or “What happened!” whenever something happens on TV. I so rarely just sit and watch TV with no distractions, I jokingly started ranking shows based on how many screens I have open. A single screen show is the highest accolade – reserved only for the most riveting viewing (I think Game Of Thrones was the last show to earn a single screen rating).
How multi-tasking keeps us numb
When I reflected on how I’d slipped into this comatose busy-ness, I realised a lot of it was driven by a subconscious fear of not being productive enough. But when I dug a little deeper, I realised measuring my self-worth by my productivity was in effect, keeping me stressed, anxious and in a trance of “never quite enough”. It was a way of distracting myself from what was actually going on – around me and within me.
"Multi-tasking kept me disconnected from body and from my emotions.”
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that doing several things at once was not clever or tough. Multi-tasking keeps me numb to the present moment which means I am too “far away” to feel what’s really going on. It keeps me disconnected from my body. It keeps me disconnected my emotions. It keeps me disconnected from the people around me. It keeps me disconnected from the present moment.
As a result, I often managed to avoid uncomfortable emotions, but it also meant I wasn’t “there” to notice the nice ones too. I was too distracted to notice the small wells of joy that spring up every day. Like the little gold coins that appear in Mario Kart, there were moments of sweetness that materialise every day – even in the uncertainty and scariness of 2020 – if only I had been paying attention. That’s how I began to experiment with the idea of single-tasking.
What is single tasking?
Single-tasking is a way of practising mindfulness meditation in waking moments. I set myself the goal of doing a task, and doing just that, paying attention to whatever it is, with a non-judgmental awareness, and resist the urge to check my phone, turn on the TV, start listening to a podcast, flick through a book. To my amazement, when I started doing this, the little gold coins of sweetness began to appear everywhere.
It sounds simple, but in this era of multi-screening, it’s actually much more challenging than you first think. But the pay-offs are worth the initial discomfort. Even just noticing how edgy and anxious you feel when you’re forced to only concentrate on *gasp* one screen, is an intriguing exercise.