On One Thing At A Time

Plus “Analog” Unpacked

1.

I’ve been working on a new old thing. A habit, a mantra, call it what you will. It feels pretty radical: ONE. THING. AT. A. TIME.

Of the many massive transformations that digital life has effected, the demand for and normalization of constant multi-tasking is a big one. You check your email or scroll social media while you eat lunch. You listen to a podcast while exercising or washing dishes. You click from tab to tab around the Internet when you should be writing or finishing a work task. You catch up on significant happenings with your tween while driving them to school and minding your text messages (and they mind their social media).

These external habits I suspect translate into a state of perpetual mental multi-tasking, which is a kind of normalized attention deficit: I am talking to you, but my mind is “clicking multiple tabs” internally, noting three things unresolved from the day or needing attention tomorrow (consequently, I hear but don’t quite listen to what you’re saying). I start reading something, which triggers something else I want to look into, so I click another mental tab as my eyes pass over words and my mind travels elsewhere, and I’ve missed several paragraphs.

The quality of our work and our relationships—the two biggies that comprise a meaningful life—has changed. In favor of quantity and speed. I am not at this point making a judgment about this; just an observation.

It’s not new of course that our minds are preoccupied with many things. But the pace at which we expect ourselves and one another to process and act on these many things has accelerated—so much so and with such persistence that our brains have adapted. Again: for the better or worse, depending on what you most value.

Our minds now typically shift laterally and pivot direction rapidly, to the tune and rhythm of our clicking and tapping. The architecture of a hyperlinked Internet, along with a smartphone always on our person, has trained our brains into simultaneity and multidirectionality. Linearity is old school. Beginning-to-end on a single track is rare because it is inefficient and limiting. One-Thing-at-a-Time is unambitious and maybe even uninteresting.

Now I am parroting normative judgments; new-school values creeping into prevalence. It is harder and harder—partly due to evolving techno-neurology, but also because it is considered less valuable—to start and finish something in a patient, forward-moving, deepening way.

I’m finding of late I’ve had to make a conscious choice—a mantra, a new-old discipline—to do One Thing At A Time, because it was becoming alarmingly less frequent that I read a magazine article, beginning to end, in one sitting. I started reading more audiobooks, because I am too restless to still my mind for several chapters at a time without also moving my body. My partner and I have noticed more and more that we stand up from our desks and walk to the next room with an intention, and that intention is lost by the time we get there. What the fuck did I just come in here for? I don’t think it’s just aging (he thinks it is); it’s the clicking of the links and tabs in my brain, so by the time I get to the kitchen I’ve lost I need a glass of water.

My case may be embarrassingly pathetic, but I don’t think I am an extreme outlier. When we go out to dinner, the majority of couples or parents with children have their phones out, and they are not looking at or speaking to each other. If you are not busy—busying yourself multiply—you are the outlier.

2.

I have just finished writing the above paragraphs and my mind and my hands want to click over to my email tab. To check. What’s going on there. What have I missed, or what will I forget to do if I don’t check on it right now. My phone sits next to my keyboard. A text message or phone call may arrive. I should be accessible, because in my life texts are generally time-sensitive. (I should add that this frenetic energy persists even now, while I am abstaining from social media.)

What is this really about? Unhealthy behaviors are almost always rooted in fear. What is the fear that drives this normalized irrationality?

Put another way: What does it mean to miss something, to be slow to respond, to “fall behind.” What will befall us if a thought or urge enters the mind and we do not act on it—do not respond to a text or slack, or check email, or look something up online, or check who liked our post right now?

What I’m trying to walk us (me) toward, step-by-step, linearly, leaning in to a beginning-to-end reasoning process, without interruption or pivot… is that none of this means what we fear it means.

Barring true emergencies, choosing focused attention over mental-processing-as-wack-a-mole—sticking with One Thing At A Time—will not mean failure. It will not mean sacrificing goals or quality of work or important relationships. It will not mean being disliked or passed over.

What will befall us, I believe, if we make different, attentive choices, is the deprogramming of our brains. New muscle memory and down-cycling of our nervous systems. The capacity not to do more, but to do better. If the goal is to be the most effective and valuable humans to the humans who are most important to us, at home and in work, then heightened fight-or-flight is not the state we want to be in the majority of the time.¹

I am thankful to Tricia Hersey and her book/movement Rest Is Resistance for declaring, unambiguously, that deprogramming is what is called for. There is so much in this word: the HUMILITY to recognize the impact of technology, culture, and corporate power on the best of us (who like to believe we are in full control of our minds); the CLARITY to call out the truth that we are not machines, and yet we have been relegated to dehumanized labor, good primarily for efficiency and productivity in a techno-capitalist society; and the FIGHT to do the counter-labor, building new muscles to practice old ways—human-scaled and human-centered ways that acknowledge our souls as much as our bodies and minds.

And what does it mean to do this counter-labor? Like so many things I am passionate about here at The New Old School, re-learning and practicing One Thing At A Time means everything.

Hersey speaks from a place of life experience and historical credibility: One-Thing-At-A-Time could, certainly, be seen as a luxury. But Hersey asserts that slowing down—respecting that your body and mind are designed for much more than grinding at a machine-like pace—is a powerful act of resistance on the side of universal human wellness. It is her personal claim to justice and reparations, and to her soul:

Your body is a site of liberation. It doesn’t belong to capitalism.

My commitment to rest as a form of resistance came from my everyday experiences of being part of the machine level pace of our culture and surviving the trauma of the terror of poverty, exhaustion, white supremacy, and capitalism.

Rest has been revolutionary for my soul… my refusal to donate my body to a system that still owes a debt to my ancestors for the theft of their labor and dreamspace.

Let the chips fall where they may. I trust myself more than capitalism. Our refusal will make space for abundance. We will have to leap and trust rest.

The counter labor, in other words, is to live and move at a human pace, in defiance of a capitalistic one. Pause, exhale, do nothing. Replenish. Start the next thing. Mindful, humane industriousness. The irony of Hersey’s original movement—The Nap Ministry—is its brilliance. One-Thing-At-A-Time is a refusal that requires its own kind of labor, along with faith and courage; and may easily be perceived as laziness or irrresponsibility. And so, sure, it may mean failure to some who would judge you. Therein lies more counter-labor: recognizing their judgment is about them, not you.

It is our unique spiritual labor as humans to be as much as it is to do.

3.
I have time-blocked this two-hour period to move forward, linearly, paragraphs in succession, on this draft. It’s become a habit-forming imperative, a minute-by-minute de-programming / re-programming. There’s an attention valve, and it’s a muscle. You have to be able to open it and close it and open it again at distinct intervals, by your own will. It’s mental fitness, and it’s not sexy.

I have resorted to these sticky notes. I tell the note to tell me when to start and when to a finish a task or chunk of work; when to break for human interaction or physical movement or food. I have assigned myself the radical (for me) task of eating lunch every weekday, 30 minutes—no book, no podcast, no news, no email or phone. Just: feed the body, rest the mind.

Adult life means multiple responsibilities, heavy demands pulling on our time and energy: family, household, health, work that earns money, creative work that only sometimes earns money. Most people don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing these in proportion. What I’m talking about is how we spend our hours. Because how we spend our hours is how we spend our days. And as Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days… a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

I am leaning in to the possibility that this unsexy labor can make magic. Here’s a story: Recently we were scheduled to be on an early morning flight. We overslept. There were several legs to the journey from home to boarding gate, with all attending potential for delays. We planned two and a quarter hours door to door, and now we had exactly one. Both of us were tired and grumpy, which was lucky; we did not bother to freak out. Neither of us said, We’ll never make it.

We did One Thing At A Time.

We got dressed. Made coffee. No fuss, just focus. Traffic was modest. The shuttle met us immediately at the parking lot. We got off the shuttle at the wrong terminal. Oh well. We refocused and found the right terminal. We arrived at the gate with one minute to spare. The crew had kept the doors open and did not push off. They had called our cells and were waiting to hear if we were not coming (but we were singularly focused; we were not looking at our phones). The whole thing was eerily magical. In our seats, we buckled up and looked at each other in disbelief.

And now we have a different kind of muscle memory. A different possibility for efficiency and accomplishment.

4.

A word about the neuroscience² of multi-tasking.

I say “the brain” is doing this, “our brains” are doing that, and anyone with scientific knowledge or curiosity is right to wonder, Does she even know what she’s talking about?

Scientific studies identify three kinds of brain processing that we refer to as “multi-tasking”: rapid task-switching, concurrent multitasking, and complex multitasking. The first two are the most common—what we are doing as Internet and social media hounds (rapid task-switching), and when we drive and talk on the phone (concurrent multi-tasking). According to this Brown University neuropsychologist, none of it is good for brain health:

This constant switching taxes our brain [and] affects our ability to focus our attention in general, even when we are not multitasking…

For example, individuals rated as high media multitaskers (number of hours using multiple devices simultaneously, such as watching TV while also using a smart phone or tablet) showed poorer attention on cognitive tasks.

Those individuals had to use more of their brain to complete the same task compared to low multitaskers. When you need to recruit more of your brain to complete a task, it means your brain is working less efficiently.

Trying to focus your brain multiply at once is not what it’s wired to do. Working against its native pathways has consequences:

Multitasking temporarily increases stress levels which raises blood pressure and heart rate. Multitasking is also associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Not shocking news. But it’s not coming from me; the doctor of neuropsychology says so. And as for complex multitasking, I can’t help but think of Carmy Berzatto—chef genius from the TV series The Bear—whose literal and creative livelihood rely on being able to perform daily and for several hours multiple cognitive and physical tasks at an impossibly high level at once. Hats off to every successful chef of a successful restaurant; but there is a reason they are generally portrayed or characterized as both extremely anxious with limited capacity for non-kitchen human functioning.

5.

In addition to deprogram, here is another relevant and intriguingly multivalent word: ANALOG.

These days we mostly think this word to mean “not digital” (an analog watch) or “not online” (analog dating). Or colloquially, something slow and old-fashioned, that which a Luddite prefers (e.g. a typewriter).

Can’t resist the opportunity for some typewriter porn.

In the context of One-Thing-At-A-Time, I had almost forgotten the noun form of the word—an analog as something parallel or nearly representative of something else. Setting description in a novel as an analog to music in film. Digital processing as an analog to a brain’s thinking.

There is a third definition that bridges these two in a revelatory way. From vocabulary.com:

Of a circuit or device having an output that is proportional or similar to the input (adj)

In other words, an analog (adj) device or process—a watch as a representation of time, a typewriter manifesting intellectual or creative thinking—creates an analog (noun) of the original. The output is “proportional or similar” to—a facsimile of—the input.

Dictionary definitions of analog do officially include “not digital : not computerized” (Merriam-Webster). It stands thus to reason that “digital” is to be contrasted with “proportional or similar.” In other words, analog more closely expresses the original input—is more real, granting that we identify authenticity as inherent to the original—than digital.

One-Thing-At-A-Time is analog. Quantitative simultaneity—the bedrock of digital—click click click, tab-shifting and power-skimming, blasting and broadcasting your intellectual or creative self to hundreds or thousands in a single instant, is a poor (diluted, distorted) analog of the originality of your input. Here, yes, I am taking a side:

Analog, from the Greek analogia, meaning proportionate, according to ratio between parts or quantities.

One-Thing-At-A-Time respects proportions of input and output, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Digital amplifies the original quantitatively only, from one bit to thousands and millions of bits. Digital is objectively non-proportionate; digital is, in my opinion, way out of proportion.

Marketers know this. They want the best of both worlds. So-called personalized algorithms, automated customization (an oxymoron). People want to exist as people, be treated like people not robots. Not dollar signs, not zombies to be manipulated. Digital marketing and social media both attempt to mimic One Person At A Time. They are poor analogs.

I’ll never get tired of sharing this — the straw that broke the camel’s back and initiated my Amazon-free life.

6.

(The idea of marketing a book One Person At A Time is just crazy and impossible enough for me to want to try.)

7.

One last bit of word-nerdiness.

As a conscious practice, One-Thing-At-A-Time has in fact been for me pretty radical after several years in an intense multi-tasking work environment. One-Thing-At-A-Time is time-blocking discipline (cognitive behavioralism) + mindfulness (Eastern thought) + emotional honesty (root-cause psychotherapy). It’s not easy. It forces me to observe the ways in which I sabotage myself and fail at the very fruitfulness I am aiming for.

It is also—insofar as it is a kissing cousin of the Rest movement—resistance. A refusal of everything that has programmed us to live as if productivity and efficiency are all we are, all we are worth, all there is. Resistance is also hard; but it is liberating.

I love how Tricia Hersey uses “rest” in three parts of speech: Rest practice (adjective); to thrive you must rest (verb imperative); trust rest (noun). Magic comes in three’s. But, you can always take it One Thing At A Time.

1. Again, barring a catastrophic situation, in which case, yes, fight-or-flight is our friend.

2. Speaking of multi-tasking, I am at once fascinated and terrified by neuroscience. On the one hand it is a relief to know there is some method to the brain’s madness; on the other, I am very unsettled by this idea of “my brain” as distinct from me, apart from me, doing its own thing that is not me doing it.