by A. J. Jacobs
In short, multitasking rots your skull.
Of course, not all multitasking is created equal. It helps if one of the tasks requires less intellectual wattage. If you’re mopping the floor while talking on the phone, it’s a lot better than texting while on the phone. But even with the mopping, you’re eating away at attention. Your conversation will suffer, if only mildly.
THE ODYSSEUS STRATEGY
I’ve got to do something about my desk. This is where most of my crimes against focus occur.
There’s a great Onion headline: EMPLOYEE’S MULTITASKING DOESN’T INCLUDE WORK. That’s the way I’m feeling these days. My book is way overdue. My editor keeps sending me e-mails that say, “How’s writing?” the subtext being, “Turn in your book this week or you’ll be publishing it on your Epson printer and binding it at the copy center.”
It’s just that there are so many temptations. So many needs to fulfill. Snacks, cups of water, caffeine, curiosity about what Julie’s doing. I pop up from my desk once every five minutes.
I’m in Day Four of the experiment, and I decide to engage in some light bondage. It worked for Odysseus. During Project Rationality, I read about how Odysseus demanded his sailors tie him to the mast so that he wouldn’t take a swan dive off the starboard side when he heard the alluring singing of the Sirens.
Eminently rational. So in an homage to Odysseus, I’ve tied myself to the gray Aeron chair in front of my computer. I tried to use my leather belt, but it didn’t fit. Instead I’m running a long black extension cord behind the chair and knotting it five times in my lap. It feels kind of safe, like a seat belt.
Five minutes ago, I thought of adjusting the lamp, since the bulb was spotlighting my face like I was about to sing a solo in A Chorus Line. But then I’d have to unknot the cord and get up. I keep my butt in the chair and return to my computer. It’s working!
“A.J.!” Julie wants something.
“What’s up!” I start untying myself.
“A.J.?”
She opens the door to my office and catches me fiddling with the cord. She furrows her brow. She looks at my computer to see if I’m signed on to a site that requires you to be at least eighteen years of age.
“For a project?”
“Uh-huh.”
I’m trying not to tell her about my plans in advance, not even the topics of my experiments, so her reactions can be more rigorously scientific. She’s stopped asking questions.
“When you’re, um, finished, can you get down the small suitcase?”
If you can tolerate the skeptical looks, I strongly recommend the tying yourself down. I finished off large chunks of my book in the last two hours.
It helps that I’m blocking out an equally tempting siren: the Internet.
I will not be checking the Hasbro website to see how many marbles we’ve lost from Hungry Hungry Hippos. Which could lead to an animated YouTube movie of the green Hungry Hippo singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Which might lead to the Wayne and Garth “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene. Which then could lead to a page about the scandal caused when Wayne made unkind remarks about Chelsea Clinton. Well, I won’t do it again.
Because I’ve made accessing the Internet an enormous hassle. Simply turning it off isn’t enough for me. I’d just go back and turn it on. Instead I went into my system preferences and went trigger happy. I clicked a bunch of random tabs and buttons until I was disconnected from my wireless. I did actually get some work done. My brain was still craving stimulation—I keep clicking on the Firefox icon wistfully. But I know the dry spell is good for me.
Oh, and those four minutes it took me to get back on the Internet at the end of the day—that was collateral damage.
(Note: My hard drive crashed during one of these games of Russian roulette. I’m not sure whether it was the fault of the Russian roulette. But if it was, then it cost me another six hours on the phone with Apple tech support, during which time they said such unwelcome phrases as “That’s not good” and “I’ve never heard of that happening before.” So the jury’s still out on this method.)
JUST SIT
Studies show that perhaps the best way to improve your focus and learn to unitask is by meditating. There’s something called an executive system—it’s the part of the brain that oversees where your attention goes, like the conductor of a symphony. Meditation is like going to conducting school.
So a week into my quest, I take the subway to Greenwich Village and ride an elevator up to the Zendo on the eleventh floor. It’s as I expected it—a lot of white walls, blond wood, a statue of Buddha.
Today is beginner’s class, and there are eight students—all of us men. Which is odd. I never considered meditation up there in the list of manly pursuits next to fantasy league hockey and invading countries. But here we are, eight males, ready to kick some meditation butt.
The teacher is named Derek, and looks exactly like Jimmy Carter, if Jimmy Carter were to put on a pair of loose black pants and a T-shirt with Japanese characters.
“Let’s bow to our pillows,” says Derek.
Each of us dutifully presses his palms together and bows to his assigned round, chocolate-colored cushion. We sit down in a circle.
My fellow meditators are all in their twenties, thirties, and forties. A couple have come straight from the office, their ties loosened but intact. They look like they’ve taken a hammering from the S&P 500 and are hoping to find some ancient Eastern-style peace.
“Tonight, we’re going to sit. That’s what meditation is all about—sitting.” Derek’s voice is Mister Rogers–style soothing. I guess that’s a job requirement. You can’t teach deep relaxation if you sound like Gilbert Gottfried, which means I can scratch it off my list of potential careers.
Derek talks calmly and wisely. He talks about how meditation helps us slow down and see the “amazingness of the universe” and the beauty of koans. “You have to appreciate your life,” he says. “The pain, the struggles, the farts.”
We men chuckle. After fifteen minutes he asks, “Does anyone have any questions? Because I could ramble on all day.”
I raise my hand. I like musings and fart references as much as the next guy, but I want to get to the meat. So I say, “Can you tell us the technique for meditating? Some tips?”
“I’m going to get to that,” he said. There was just a tiny ripple of annoyance in his pond of serenity.
“Oh. Sorry.”
I’m chastened. Not so Zen of me.
Derek does give us some simple marching orders—sit up straight, keep your eyes open but don’t focus on anything, try not to move. Our starter gun is a wooden chime that he knocks. And we’re off on a fifteen-minute sit.
I sit. And sit, staring at the floor in the middle of the circle. I listen to the guy next to me breathe. He’s breathing loudly. Really loudly. Like Darth Vader. With asthma. During heavy foreplay.
It makes me self-conscious about my own inhaling and exhaling. I’m a heavy breather myself. When we were growing up and watching TV together, my sister would tell me to stop breathing so loudly. I’d make an elaborate show of holding my breath, then after half a minute I’d say, “Would it be okay to inhale now, ma’am?”
It’s just a sound, this wheezing. Rise above it. Don’t focus on it.
Tock-tock. Derek hits the wooden chime again.
“How’d everyone do?” he asks.
“Great.” “Really good.” “Good.”
I say nothing, too ashamed to confess.
A few minutes later, we try our second and final sit. This time we’ve graduated from the bunny slope. It’ll be twenty minutes, we’ll be facing the wall, and we’ll be counting our breaths.
Things go a bit better. I’m not annoyed by the background noises, the taxis, and the sighs. I let them flow in one ear and out the other. But I still can’t settle my mind. My monkey mind, as they call it in meditation.
The thoughts keep pinging around in my skull. Dozens of them. I think of my aunt’s bizarre ex
-husband Gil, who spent months meditating on an ashram, and who claims in his autobiography that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi “couldn’t keep his hands off Mia Farrow’s butt.” Eighty-two. Eighty-three. I think of the time I went to see Buddhist poet Gary Snyder speak in Berkeley, and how he said he liked to go to museums and stare at the white spaces in between the paintings. One hundred four. One hundred five.
I wonder what’s the highest anyone has ever counted in meditation. What if you get up to the millions? Would you still be able to say the numbers in one breath?
I haven’t quite got the hang of this yet. I leave the Zendo at the same time as one of the guys with a tie, who proceeds to fart in the elevator.
DINNER WITHOUT DISTRACTION
“Can we eat dinner tonight without multitasking?” I ask, a couple of days later.
“What does that mean?” Julie says.
“No TV. Just a quiet dinner.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Also, no talking to each other. I just want to concentrate on eating.”
Julie is sitting on the bed. She collapses her head on her knees.
“Why do you choose the worst times to ask me these things?”
She’s had a long day, and is in no mood to sit in silence.
“It’s for the project.”
“Fine.”
I put out the plates and we each take some spoonfuls of the vegetable pad thai we ordered.
“I’m at least going to call my mom,” she says.
“No. You can’t. That’d distract our focus.”
We sit across from each other. I smile and chew.
It reminds me of this astounding passage from George Washington’s letters. At one point, he wrote, he and Martha had not had dinner at home alone for twenty years. Every night for twenty years—7,300 days in a row—they had guests and visiting dignitaries to entertain.
Julie’s and my guests were TV characters. How long has it been since we’ve eaten together at home without firing up the TiVo to 30 Rock or a Mad Men?
We’re silent for several minutes. Julie nods at me. I nod back.
“This feels very Revolutionary Road,” Julie says.
I laugh. I know she thinks the whole experiment is absurd.
“No talking, please,” I say.
I concentrate on my pad thai. The salt, the crunch, the grease.
“This isn’t so bad,” I say. “It’s relaxing.”
“No talking,” she says.
Julie once told me that every month or so, she’ll look at me and think, “Hey, that’s A. J. Jacobs from the twenty-eighth floor. What the hell is he doing here in my house?”
We met when we both worked at Entertainment Weekly—I was on the twenty-eighth floor, she was on the twenty-ninth. We knew each other as colleagues for five years before our first date.
I’m looking at Julie across the table, and I’m having a “Hey, that’s Julie Schoenberg from the twenty-ninth floor” moment.
“I’m glad I met you,” I say.
“No talking.”
EXTREME FOCUS
The next morning, I decide to track down a unitasker par excellence. During my biblical year, I’d run across a job called a sofer. These are the Jewish scribes who copy the Bible one painstaking letter at a time. A single Bible can take years to finish. And the stakes are high. If your attention wanders and you make an errant stroke while writing the name of G-d, you have to start the whole section again, losing hours or maybe days.
This, I figure, is Extreme Focus.
I find a sofer on the Internet and dial him up. I put the phone to my ear and shut my eyes. That’s how I’m talking on the phone nowadays. I’m a Blind Caller. Remember those Mesozoic days when people actually sat and talked on the phone—just talked? I’m trying to re-create that. The key is to close the eyes and remove temptation. So much less stressful. It’s a blissful freedom from choice that leads to phone conversations with actual substance.
He answers. I explain my project.
“I’m Xeroxing something,” he says. “Can I call you back in five minutes?”
An hour later, my cell phone chimes.
“Okay, that was more than five minutes. I don’t know if you work in an office where you have to go somewhere to. . .” He pauses. “Come in!” Another pause. “Oh, I need to sign this. Okay, the signature here?
“I’m going to put the phone down for one minute,” Neil says.
In the background, I hear shuffling.
“Have you seen my calendar downstairs?” Neil shouts to someone.
Hmm. Is this the right man to talk to about sustained focus?
Twenty minutes and several interruptions later, we’ve arranged to meet next Monday at the Applejack Diner in midtown.
Neil looks a bit like a yarmulke-clad Harvey Fierstein. He’s wearing a striped blue shirt and a gray vest. A former advertising man, he became a scribe twenty-five years ago. And his handwriting is beautiful. When he writes down my address to send me a book, it appears on the page full of swirls and flourishes. My ZIP code looks as elegant as the Preamble to the Constitution.
It takes him up to a year to write a Torah, working ten hours a day. Has his head hit the board from exhaustion? Yes. But he does love it. “When the scribe is not present, the letter is not alive. It just becomes a series of strokes.”
When I ask him how he keeps from being bored, he shows me by taking out a calligraphy pen and a piece of paper. Each letter can be viewed from a thousand different angles. The shape of the letters—the slender, graceful Italian style or the blockier Czech look. You can think of the frequency the letters appear in. Or how the letter relates to its original pictogram. He speaks quickly, excitedly.
That’s the secret to getting into the state of flow—being totally in love with your topic. I remember I once met an ornithologist who was visiting my grandfather’s house. The man stood at the back door with a stoned-like smile on his face for an hour, just watching the birds.
I’m not in a state of flow. I’m battling a nasty cold, and can barely keep my eyelids from drooping as Neil talks about the personality of the different letters. I tune out, coming in occasionally to hear things like “The orange juice is there, was there, and always will be there.”
To keep myself engaged, I ask him another question: How do you keep from making errors?
“You can’t think about it. You’re going to mess up. So what? You start over. If you want to avoid making a mistake, you cannot try to avoid making a mistake. You just have to forget about it.”
I know what he means. It’s a strange tic of our brain. Sometimes, the more goal-oriented we are, the less likely we are to attain that goal. If you really, really want something, you have to forget how much you want it. Or else you’ll be too nervous to get it. But dear Lord, that’s a cruel and paradoxical system evolution has devised.
And it invades even the lowliest of human endeavors. If I’m standing next to my boss at the urinal and really want to pee, I can’t think about peeing. If I say, “Okay, now pee,” I’ll be standing there till the building closes down. I have to think about, say, the color of the wall. Sometimes, it seems, you can pay too much attention.
A week ago, Julie and I went to see Doubt. And Philip Seymour Hoffman’s charismatic priest (who may or may not have done something horrible) teaches the basketball team how to toss a free throw. He says you can’t think about throwing the free throw, or you’ll get too nervous. You have to have a routine. Bend your knees. Bounce the ball twice. Whatever it is, do it every time. And you’ll be thinking of your routine and you’ll forget to be nervous.
Sometimes, you have to focus on the trees, not the forest.
BOUNDARIES
My cell phone rings. It’s my mom.
“A.J., I’m trying to buy Julie a present for—”
“Can I call you back?”
She seems a little put out. I usually talk to her, seeing as I’m not an air traffic controller and can take a couple of minutes out
of my day.
“It’s just that these are work hours,” I explain.
It’s two-thirty in the afternoon and I’m trying to be one of the only people in America who still works a nine-to-five job. I want to work, then stop. I don’t punch a clock, but I do jot down my starting and ending time.
“I’ll call you at five-fifteen.”
Maggie Jackson, the author of Distracted, says it’s essential to set borders around work. She does it physically, by sitting down, stretching her arms, and saying to herself, Okay, this is work time.
I call back at five-fifteen. Then Julie and I have dinner. Then I go back to work at eight-thirty. Workaholism is a hard disease to cure.
THE WISDOM OF GURU BILL MURRAY
I am in line at the corner deli to buy a Diet Coke. So naturally, I say to myself, “I’m waiting in line to buy a Diet Coke.” I speak it out loud, as confidently as I can.
The guy in front of me—wearing a CBS Sports hat—swivels his head.
“I’m looking around the store,” I continue. “I see a stack of oranges and bananas.”
He looks at my head for an earpiece. Maybe a Bluetooth headset to reassure himself that I’m on the phone. Nope. I’m just talking to myself.
“And now I’m getting my wallet out of my pants.”
He looks at me like, well, like he’s just seen a child vomit into an Easter basket.
It’s all part of my new strategy for unitasking. It’s a strange one, but it does have scientific backing. I call it the Bill Murray Method of Extreme Focus.
Maybe you remember the scene in Caddyshack? The one in which Murray’s whackjob, gopher-hunting greenskeeper pretends to be playing golf. He’s got a gardening tool and he’s thwacking these fancy white flowers outside the clubhouse, sending the petals spraying. All the while, he’s also pretending to be a sportscaster covering the event. He’s providing his own real-time color commentary:
