Goal-setting, self-discipline, productivity and time management - I'm interested in all of these topics. I've written about them before and also about the distractions of computers, the internet and social media. I was thinking about all of the above because lately I've been feeling kind of like that mouse in the children's book
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by
Laura Joffe Numeroff.
If you're not familiar with the book, you can hear it read aloud
here. Like the mouse in the book, each thing I do gives me the idea that I want or need to do another thing, sometimes related and sometimes not. Or I attempt to do multiple things at the same time and call it "multi-tasking." I can certainly talk on the phone while I'm folding laundry or doing the dishes. But other combinations, like reading and overseeing schoolwork, don't mesh so well. I'm sitting in one room reading and hear, "What are prime numbers, again?" from the other room. I'm not giving adequate attention to either my math student or to the story I'm reading for a class. I actually waste time, because I'm going to have to reread the story anyway. And I know that when I'm attentive to my student, she tends to get her math done more efficiently. There are plenty of articles that cite research about the inefficacy and even danger of multitasking. In fact, "
Multitasking is Killing Your Brain" according to one article.
But the feeling of the mouse in the book is more a lack of focus than multitasking. Does the mouse have an attention problem? Does doing one thing make him realize he must do another? Or is he just really enthusiastic about and interested in things? What about me? If I walk down to the basement to scoop out the cat litter and notice the stairs need vacuuming, then scooping the cat litter leads me to vacuuming the stairs. Or ignoring them if I don't have time. But when looking at pictures in a book makes the mouse want to draw, his lack of focus comes from excitement or enthusiasm. In my case, I just finished reading the book
I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World (Young Readers Edition), and I'll be leading a discussion of the book with a group of middle school girls. We also watched the documentary
He Named Me Malala last night. (I highly recommend both the book and the movie, by the way.)
So today - instead of using the hours when my daughter was at her gym class to work as I had planned, I stopped at the library and checked out a few books about Pakistan. Then I came home, went to the basement and looked through a big plastic tub that holds several years of
National Geographic Magazine to see if any focused on Pakistan. Those were both fine things to do, except I had allotted that time for work. Well, I just pushed the work into the evening and got it done. But I didn't really have to look through all those magazines. I only found one about Pakistan. Then I remembered that there is an online subject index for
National Geographic. When I typed in "Pakistan," only that issue came up. That would have saved me the time I spent scanning the spines of all those magazines. In that case, technology would have been a time-saver not a time-waster.
So...am I distracted or just interested in a lot of stuff? Both, I imagine. Still, I think I'd feel less stressed and have more time to do the things I want to do, if I made more of an effort to put some boundaries around my time. My schedule - both work and home - allows for a lot of flexibility. That's good. Unlike the fictional mouse in the book, however, I do have real responsibilities. It might be better to stick to a stricter schedule. It also might be better to focus on one thing at a time and finish it before I start something else. I've already thought of some things that would help with this - turning off notifications about work or personal emails and setting aside certain times for each of those, for example.
Now, speaking of cookies - I smell something baking in the kitchen and that's a distraction I'm going to follow...
