lack of ...what were we talking about again?

Focus.

No, I'm not telling you to "focus". It's up to you whether you focus on reading this or not. 

If you can't focus on the words here, I can't really judge you. As I write them, I am also thinking about a stressful event the evening brought that took an hour and a half to resolve and am listening to a You Tube Minecraft video in the background to make sure it's not teaching my son any bad words (that's my job!).

Oh, right. Focus. I wrote that because that's what my topic is for tonight. Focus and multitasking.

Multitasking is exactly what it sounds like: attending to multiple tasks at the same time. Focus is, uh, focus. Technically, it is the direction of attention, but when we talk about focus, we generally talk about directing your full attention toward one task. This makes multitasking and focus opposites.

I've been multitasking for a long time because I can. Technology has encouraged me to think this way, to approach tasks this way. I'm not unique, by any means. We feel like we can do it based on the availability of so many bright, shiny things at our fingertips that move so fast. Technology makes it easy to do ... 

But there's something to be said for restraint. Just because you can  doesn't mean you should.

The truth is multitasking is the enemy of focus. There are plenty of data from scientific studies to support this --that say the more you spread your attention around, the more difficult it is to focus well enough on any one task to excel at it. We have a finite amount of cognitive resources. I know people like to talk about having limitless potential, but we don't. When we spread our limited resources around, we become inefficient and wasteful. It's more about quantity than quality. Think about your computer trying to run a bunch of programs at the same time. 

So here's an idea (talking to myself here, but feel free to listen in): try one thing tonight where you are only doing that one thing. Do it until you get bored --which will be quickly. Then, refocus and continue doing it without adding in more distractors. Do that one thing until it is done.

It's a challenge for a squirrel like me, but it's worth a try.

Focus.