by A. J. Jacobs
“Incredible Cinderella story. This unknown, comes out of nowhere, to lead the pack at Augusta…[thwacks a flower]…The normally reserved Augusta crowd, going wild…he’s gonna hit about a five iron it looks like. He’s got a beautiful backswing [thwack]…oh, he got all of that one! He’s got to be pleased with that…[thwack] It looks like a mirac—IT’S IN THE HOLE! IT’S IN THE HOLE! Former greenskeeper, now Masters champion.
After I saw Caddyshack when I was twelve, I started to do the same thing whenever I played sports by myself (which was my preferred way to play sports, since it cut down on the chances of losing). “Jacobs bounces the ball. He shoots! He scores! Un-bah-liev-able!”
I liked the idea of a crowd cheering me on. It jacked up the excitement. So I started to expand the self-narration to other activities. Why should sports have all the fun? “Jacobs has the Tater Tot in sight,” I’d say when eating at the brown Formica table at the cafeteria. “He spears it with his fork. Jim, will you look at that? Exquisite form. He is a master. Down goes that Tater Tot! Down goes the Tater Tot!”
I weaned myself from sportscasting my own life in high school. But now, during Project Focus, I’ve brought it back with force. Well, at least a version of it. I’ve cut down on the “crowd goes wild” and I’ve switched from “Jacobs” to first person. But I’m narrating my own existence.
If I go to the bathroom, I say, “I’m going to the bathroom.” I know I sound like Rain Man. But I’m telling you, it’s changed my life.
First, it’s a good torch to keep away the multitasking monsters. If I start to absentmindedly multitask, I’ll be the first to know. No secrets from myself.
But more than that, it’s Buddhist enlightenment by way of Bob Costas. More specifically:
• It forces you to live a mindful life. You are present. “I am walking through Central Park. I’m in the middle of a crowded city, and I can barely see the buildings, barely hear the traffic, just trees and jutting rocks and grass. Amazing.” It makes me thankful for nature and New York and Frederick Law Olmsted. When I interview attention researcher Meredith Minear from the College of Idaho, she says I stumbled onto an ancient technique. Part of the reason that evolution developed vocalizing was to hone our attention.
• It helps balance your emotions. The very act of saying “I’m angry” makes you less angry. It lights up the language centers in the brain, which are in the more evolved cerebral cortex, which allows you to better control yourself. When you label something, you gain a level of mastery over it. You’ll still be pissed, you may still want to smack that person with numchucks, but you’ll have a little distance and perspective.
• It tips you off to warped thinking. The other day, Julie told me she left her New York magazine in one of the suitcases she took on a weekend trip, but she couldn’t remember which. I searched the first, then the second, then the third. I found the magazine in the third suitcase. “Of course, it’s in the third,” I said out loud. “That’s my luck.” I paused. “Actually, maybe that’s not my luck. I learned from my Rationality Project, my luck is average. It’s just that I remember the unlucky incidents more often.”
“I’m bringing you the New York magazine,” I said.
“I see that,” Julie said.
“I’m handing it to you, my wife, and then I’m going to leave the room.”
“Thanks for the update!”
“I’m noticing the painting in our living room for the first time in two years. It’s nice and bright and yellow.”
“Good to know.”
She’d already started to read the magazine.
VIRTUAL SITTING
Yesterday, I made a crucial discovery: Wii Fit offers a meditation video game. A video game! And here I had been trying to do it in real life without electronic equipment, like some loser from the eighth century.
The “game” is called “Lotus Focus,” and the idea is to watch a pixellated candle flicker onscreen while you are sitting on a Wii sensor board. And then continue sitting really still. If you move, you lose.
I crossed my legs, sat down, and pressed start. Forty-three seconds later, I must have shifted a butt muscle. The game finished with a curt sayonara.
Until they add a secret trapdoor where you can enter an opium den and flirt with geisha girls, Lotus Focus is probably not going to outsell Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s basically a really expensive version of Statues—a “game” my mom made us play at my seventh birthday when we kids got too rowdy. Same goal: stay really still. At least Statues had candy prizes involved at the end. (Incidentally, I found out the ultimate cheat on Lotus Focus. I packed up a suitcase with books and put it on the Wii sensor board. Can’t get much stiller. A winner every time! What is the sound of one hand high-fiving, suckah?)
So Wii is not the path to enlightenment. I’m going to have to keep meditating without electronic devices. Which is why, for half an hour each night, I’ve been sitting on some scrunched-up pillows, lowering my lids to half-mast, cupping my hands in my lap, and trying to do it old school.
The first four or five times I thought I might die of boredom. I fell asleep twice, once with my eyes open. I also tipped backward once, just about banging my head on a bookshelf. (Business idea: meditation helmets.)
I read a knee-high stack of meditation books. I was doing all different styles—Samatha, Vipassana. Eyes open, closed, half-mast. I chanted in Hindi, in English. (“Don’t worry, be happy,” one book recommended.) I paid attention to my breath as it entered my nostrils and filled my lungs. I bought a book called 8 Minute Meditation. Eight minutes! You can get washboard abs and become a bodhisattva with the exact same daily time commitment.
I read one book that said the key to meditation is to remember it isn’t passive. It’s hard work. Aha! This shifted my whole paradigm. It’s basically working on your brain like a muscle. Meditation is free weights for my prefrontal cortex. I’m going to be the Mr. Universe of brains.
It’s all about maintaining focus. You focus on something—your breath, your mantra, a soft-boiled egg—and if your mind wanders, you yank it back. It’s a death match between your focus and your brain’s desire to go gallivanting.
I meditated like I was going into combat. I will squash extraneous thoughts! That lasted a week, until I realized that’s too violent. That’s not Zen. I’m being pathetically Western.
You have to “gently and without judgment” guide your thoughts back to your breath. If I’m going to go with a sports metaphor, I’ll go with surfing, which seems appropriately Californian. The mind has plenty of churning whitecaps. But you just need to stay above them. You watch your thoughts pass by as if you’re watching a boat glide in the distance. Oh, look, now I’m thinking about how I’m older than Sherman McCoy, the Master of the Universe character in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and how ancient he seemed when I first read that book. Okay. Well, so be it. Now focus again on the breathing.
Nowadays, when my alarm chimes after half an hour of meditating, I emerge in one of two states. Either I’m calm, serene, and sharp-minded, and feel as if I’ve just taken a run around the reservoir, but without having to put on sneakers or sweat. Or else I’m calm, serene, and befuddled, as if my brain has been soaking in some thick clam chowder.
So is it working? Are my focusing muscles getting buff? As novice as my meditation skills are, it does seem to help me in real life, at least a little. When I’m sitting at my desk, I’m much more quick to notice when my attention starts to wander. Where you going? Get back here, you big lug. I firmly but kindly pull the leash back to, say, my article on Mike Huckabee for Esquire.
THOUGHT CONTROL
That’s the key. I’m much more aware of what I’m thinking about. It’s like I’ve created a lifeguard for my mind, always watching, scanning. I’m obsessed with metacognition.
Sometimes, I’ll let my mind wander a bit. As long as it’s wandering into an interesting territory, I’m all for it. The problem is, it usually wanders into the same old neighborhoods. It dwel
ls on ridiculous and embarrassing fantasies, like this one: I wish I had been the subway hero—the guy who jumped onto the tracks and saved another passenger—so I could have used my exalted moral status to promote my Bible book.
That’s when I force my brain back into the present. Focus on what’s around you. Unitask.
I’ve realized something else, though: when you’re in the moment, you can be in the moment in a good way or a bad way.
I read David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon College the other day. It’s a brilliant speech. It’s about what we decide to think about during everyday, mundane tasks—waiting in line at the grocery, sitting in traffic.
We can let our thoughts follow our brain’s default mode—annoyance, pettiness, outrage, selfish fantasies. Or we can make a conscious choice to “exercise some control over how and what you think.”
Instead of snarling at the guy in the Hummer who just cut you off in traffic, you can consider the possibility—however remote—that the Hummer “is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in his way.”
Today I passed a woman on the street who’s a mom in Jasper’s class. I’ve passed her several times before, and I always try to catch her eye to say hi, and she always looks through me with an empty stare, like an Egyptian pharaoh’s funerary mask. It drives me crazy.
But Wallace was right. I should make a conscious decision to jolt myself out of my brain’s lazy tendency toward pettiness: maybe she’s really shy, maybe her sister is going through an ugly divorce, maybe she’s just nearsighted. That’s the noble path of unitasking.
LAST DAY
It’s my last day. The plan was to really hunker down and do a perfect day without multitasking. I stashed my BlackBerry on the top shelf of a closet. I did my morning meditation to pump up my focusing muscles.
And then, at 10 A.M., I blew it. I watched a Demetri Martin video while researching an Esquire article. I checked CNN.com at noon. I took a cell phone call while making my turkey sandwich, though I begged off after forty-five seconds, ashamed.
It’s now five-thirty and I’ve just punched the clock. I walk to the living room, where Zane has just dumped all the pennies and nickels from his watermelon-shaped piggy bank onto our striped rug.
His mission is to pour out all the coins and put them back in. Then repeat. His brothers are working on an equally important task: taking DVDs out of a drawer and putting them back.
Zane invites me to collaborate with him on his project. “Help, Daddy!”
I clink a nickel in the slot.
“I’m here with my three sons, putting nickels in a watermelon bank.”
I say this sentence out loud, per the Bill Murray Method. I have three sons. They are healthy. They get pleasure from putting coins in a slot. I am overwhelmed with gratitude. Maybe it’s the lingering effects of cold medication, but I start to choke up. A real “Cat’s in the Cradle” moment.
Just outside my brain, three thousand things bark for my attention. My book deadline. Worries about the death of journalism. The invoice to the German magazine I forgot to send. But I’ve put up a soundproof wall. I’m going to put nickels in this watermelon with my son—and that’s all I’m going to do.
It is the perfect, undistracted ten minutes.
CODA
I’ve decided to try to write this coda without taking a break. And to raise the stakes, I’m doing an experiment within an experiment: I’m writing it on a typewriter, so I cannot be tempted by the evil Internet. I have to say, this is quite satisfying, seeing the words appear on an actual piece of paper. It’s so direct. No waiting for a laser printout. it’s like cooking dinner instead of ordering in. That’s not a very good metaphor, but I can’t delete. It’s actually quite freeing. No turning back!
Huh. This isn’t working. I’m not staying on task. This sensation of typewriting is far too interesting. Haven’t done it in twenty years.
Back to multitasking. I’m still an addict, but I’ve taken it down from a three-pack-a-day habit to a half-dozen cigarettes a day. Addict is the right word. Because I know it’s counterproductive and harmful to check my e-mail every two minutes, but I do it anyway. then I feel shameful and dirty about it.
I’m very thrown off by the way that this typewriter does not automatically capitalize the first letter of the word. I’m at my dad’s office because none of my friends had typewriters, but his law firm still has one Panasonic electronic typewriter. I read somewhere—and I can’t check the Internet to see where—that Nietzsche’s writing changed significantly whe he went from longhand to the typewriter. It went from being more flowing and discursive to more telegram-like, bulleted and epigrammatic.
Which brings up the question (look at that segue—thanks typewriter): During my month of unitasking, did my thinking change at all? I hope so. A little. I’m calmer. I have a sense that I’m in charge of my brain more often, that it’s not a slave to the blips and bleeps that pop up outside. I shut my eyes during phone calls. I’m getting more work done, which is huge. There’s a lot of overlap with the Rationality Project and the George Washington project. The key is self-mastery. I’ve got control of my brain’s steering wheel.
I don’t think I fully comprehended how distracted I was before this project. One example: You know Walter Kirn’s Atlantic article that I quoted? I must have skimmed that article three times before writing my essay. But only when I finished my essay and looked back at Kirn’s for fact checking did I notice something unsettling. Kirn’s essay has the same introduction as mine. Not the exact same. But similar. It’s about him being distracted while driving. I must have been listening to music or watching the Mentalist the first few times I read it. my mind didn’t even process what the first few paragraphs were about.
Speaking of which, a month after the end of the unitasker project, I had a chance to do something I hadn’t done in two years: drive. We were visiting julie’s dad in Sarasota, and Jasper desperately wanted to play miniature golf, his true passion. Julie had to take care of the twins. So Julie very nervously decided I could drive jasper. It was a five-minute drive, no highways. But it was a tense five minutes. Hands on two and ten. No playing with the window or fiddling with the radio. “Daddy! Daddy!”
“Can’t talk now,” I responded. No time for pronouns, even.
We did get there safely. I can drive, as long as there is silence and the highway is straight and there are no flashing billboards to distract me.
Chapter Two
My Outsourced Life
A key member of my outsourcing team, Honey K. Balani.
Another indispensable outsourcer, Asha Sarella.
I really shouldn’t have to write this piece myself. I mean, why am I the one stuck in front of a computer terminal? All this tedious pecking out of words on my laptop. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions. Sheesh. What a pain in my butt. Can’t someone else do it? Can’t I delegate this to one of my new assistants and spend my day kicking back on a chaise longue, Sam Adams in hand, admiring Evangeline Lilly’s navel on my TV? What about having Asha write it? Or Sunder, Vivek, or Mr. Naveen? Or best of all, my sweet, sweet Honey? Pretty much anyone on my overseas staff will do. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s one of the lessons of these jarring and curiously enlightening four weeks. Dammit. I guess I’ll have to write about the lessons, too. Okay, on with it. Here you go. As my team might say, thanking you in advance for reading this story.
It began a month ago. I was midway through The World Is Flat, the best seller by Tom Friedman. I like Friedman, despite his puzzling decision to wear a mustache. His book is all about how outsourcing to India and China is not just for tech support and carmakers but is poised to transform every industry in America, from law to banking to accounting. CEOs are chopping up projects and sending the lower-end tasks to strangers in cubicles ten time zones away. And it’s
only going to snowball; America has not yet begun to outsource.
I don’t have a corporation; I don’t even have an up-to-date business card. I’m a writer and editor working from home, usually in my boxer shorts or, if I’m feeling formal, my penguin-themed pajama bottoms. Then again, I think, why should Fortune 500 firms have all the fun? Why can’t I join in on the biggest business trend of the new century? Why can’t I outsource my low-end tasks? Why can’t I outsource my life?
The next day I e-mail Brickwork, one of the companies Friedman mentions in his book. Brickwork—based in Bangalore, India—offers “remote executive assistants,” mostly to financial firms and health-care companies that want data processed. I explain that I’d like to hire someone to help with tasks related to my job at Esquire magazine—doing research, formatting memos, things like that. The company’s CEO, Vivek Kulkarni, responds: “It would be a great pleasure to be talking to a person of your stature.”
Already I’m liking this. I’ve never had stature before. In America, I barely command respect from a Bennigan’s maître d’, so it’s nice to know that in India I have stature.
A couple of days later, I get an e-mail from my new “remote executive assistant.”
Dear Jacobs,
My name is Honey K. Balani. I would be assisting you in your editorial and personal job. . . . I would try to adapt myself as per your requirements that would lead to desired satisfaction.
Desired satisfaction. This is great. Back when I worked at an office, I had assistants, but there was never any talk of desired satisfaction. In fact, if anyone ever used the phrase “desired satisfaction,” we’d all end up in a solemn meeting with HR. And I won’t even comment on the name Honey except to say that, real or not, it sure carries Anaïs Nin undertones.
