Circus Anyone......

I wear many hats during the course of any one day, we all do, but lately I think that sometimes I have been forgetting to take off the previous hat when I put on the new one, and I am beginning to just look silly....

Of course I like to think that I have mastered the art of multitasking. It seems essential in the world we live in today to be able to juggle the endless barrage of media that comes at you from every angle: constant incoming calls, emails, text messages, meetings, tele-conferences all seemingly begging for our immediate attention regardless of what is currently underway. Multitasking has become simply a prerequisite of most industries.

Usually I fight my overwhelmed feelings and bolster my ability to multitask by making a "to do" list throughout the day, only listing 5 small things at a time. After I completed five small tasks then I’d list 5 more. I think multitasking is ineffective if one is already overloaded. To me...what good is multitasking if it leaves me with lots of things only partially done so this 5 small things method seemed to work…

But lately, my abilities to keep my hats straight has been slipping...this afternoon was a prime example: By 2:00 I had not even thought of taking a lunch, but my headache was urging me in that direction - So I started some spreadsheets printing and went off to the lunchroom to put my lean cuisine in the microwave, then come back to see if the printing job had finished while getting a phone call that required me to retrieve some information from my lap top. This is how it all ended up: I had the information on my laptop and was verifying it with my colleague on the phone...while at the same time reading my e-mails and watching the attached you-tubes on my desk computer and answering a co-workers question...by this time it was 2:45 and I was moving right along...until I hear someone down the hall from my area calling out...."did someone leave a lean cuisine in the microwave" oops...not the multitask champion after all....

So I did a little research and found that according to a study published this month that "Multi-tasking is not a sustainable answer to the too much to do and too few to do it problem. The brain’s executive control processes, the resource allocators, are overstressed and the result is a measurable time-cost".

I need to learn how to juggle instead.