206 - Multitasking — Work & Play

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Show Notes:

While so many women wear multitasking as a badge of honor, I will readily admit that I am the worst at multitasking. I—it's terrible. I get so distracted and cannot do it. And I'll be frank, this has not served me well in motherhood because the interruptions are great and we'll talk a little bit about that. But today I just wanna share my thoughts on multitasking and how it doesn't help anyone and how it's so much better if we can focus on one thing at a time.

For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.

Mastermind & Patreon Update

Okay, before I get started, there are two things that I wanted to share with you. First, I am launching a brand new online Work and Play mastermind with about 5–10 openings. You can learn all about it at nancyray.com/mastermind. But a couple things you should know as to why I am doing this now.

First of all, I don't know about you, but I love community and connection and there's something that happens when you commit to do life and work with other people for an extended amount of time. And this mastermind's gonna last six months and I'm just really excited to go deep with a handful of ladies and really look at our lives and businesses and faith and families together and grow together.

Number two, when I launched my in-person mastermind earlier this year, I had so many amazing women reach out, say that they would sign up in a heartbeat, but they just lived too far away and couldn't do it. And they really wish that I was offering an online version of it so they could be a part of it. And this is an answer to that.

Number three, I'm just excited about what we're gonna go through together. We're gonna be memorizing Bible verses together. We are gonna be completing our rules of life together. We'll create business plans and we are going to create our family mission statements and values. And we'll have like one to two 90-minute group coaching calls every month. And then a private group chat. And then you'll get Marco Polo access to me individually as well. This is gonna last for six months. That's a long time. It's half a year, but I feel like whoever signs up for it is gonna leave feeling encouraged and also feel like they have a really clear strategy for their life and work. And I'm just so excited about that.

Okay, second announcement. There are really exciting changes coming to Patreon. So patrons, I am so grateful for you. You have been with me for such a long time now and you already know about this, but the tiers are gonna be changing for my patrons and I'm gonna be offering more clarity for what you're gonna get at each tier.

But in, in addition to two very basic tiers that just support the podcast, there's gonna be a third tier for a Work and Play membership. And this gives you access to a lot of the mastermind content that I'm gonna be going through. This booklet that I've created that has the rule of life and your business strategy and even your family mission and values and even a life plan at the end of it that is going to be delivered to the membership over time, the Work and Play membership. And I'll talk also about work and play and just send like quick encouragement to you once a month there.

And so it's a way you can support the podcast but also be part of a community that is going through something together. And I'm really excited about that too. It's a great option for someone who might want to do the mastermind but can't do it right now because of time constraints or budget constraints, but you want to go through this stuff so it's, it's gonna be a lot of the same content, but you kind of go through it on your own. So the links that you need to know are nancyray.com/mastermind for applying to be part of this group. And then the second one is patreon.com/workandplay.

Those changes have not been rolled out yet, but they will by the end of this month and I'm really excited about both of those. So head to nancyray.com/mastermind or patreon.com/workandplay. And I'm so excited for what's to come.

Multitasking

Let's switch gears and let's talk about multitasking because I've already confessed that I'm the world's worst multitasker. I don't do it. Well, motherhood has really, really humbled me in this regard.

But I wanna talk about how there's a lot of scientific studies that back this up. You can Google that. You can look up all the different studies on multitasking and the effects of it on our brains. I'm not gonna go down the science path today as much as I'm just gonna ask you to just think about that. Think about how your brain feels when you're switching back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

When it gets constantly interrupted, it doesn't feel good. I mean for me it feels flighty and distracted and tired. The bottom line is our brains aren't meant to handle it. Our brains do better when they're focused on one thing at a time. And then once that thing is done, you switch to a different thing and then focus on that.

Next thing, Devora Zack says in her book, Singletasking, “our brain is simply incapable of focusing on multiple things simultaneously. Rather it simply switches the focus of its selective attention between the various tasks it has to handle at any given moment. When your brain has to make the switch, your performance suffers causing you to work less efficiently on the task you're currently focused on.”

So say you're working on a project at work and you've got your computer pulled up and you're just doing this thing and then you hear a pinging of an email and you switch over to your email inbox and you answer that real quick and you go back to that project and then you get a text message on your phone and you look at that and you answer it and then you go back to the project and then your brain starts to feel tired.

So you open up Instagram and scroll for a minute and then go down that trail and then you're like, oh, I did not mean to do that. Okay, putting my phone down, going back to the project, that's just a lot. And that can happen within five minutes. All of that can.

And your brain's already so tired, it's not gonna be producing the results in work or in whatever it is, whatever project that you're working on that it needs to accomplish, it slows us down significantly. You know, if we're constantly switching back and forth—our brain is not meant to switch so much, you just know that it slows you down. I've heard of it this way, if you, if you write like two columns, I mean it can be two columns of anything but let's just say things that you can do for work and the right side is like things that you can do for play.

Whatever your things are, work and play in your life, do this exercise if you want. But they say if you go down this list of work and you fill in everything for work and then you pause and you go to the right side and you fill in everything for play, it takes way less time to do that than if you were to write down something under work and then something under play and then something under work and then something under play and then something under work and then something under play.

It just takes longer to jump back and forth between these two ideas. Even just on a simple sheet of paper with two columns on it, your brain's just not meant to. It's meant to just focus on one thing at a time.

And I didn't even kind of mean for this to happen, but this podcast episode is a beautiful spinoff of last week's “Be where your feet are” episode because “be where your feet are” talks about just focusing on where you are and being fully present and embracing our limits and acknowledging God is the one who is limitless. And very similarly, if we choose to do one thing at a time to single task or monotask or whatever you wanna call it, we are saying we have limits, our brain has limits and this thing is gonna be better if I can just give it my full attention before I move on to the next thing.

We rob ourselves of the joy of seeing things through. Oftentimes if we get distracted so much on a project, it's hard to see it through to the end because we're getting distracted so many times and it takes us such a long amount of time to finish it. And then also by, by multitasking all the time, we're taking away from other parts of our life.

What do I mean by that? If we focus on work and then keep dabbling in work throughout the evening, it actually starts to take away from our family life and from resting. But then it also ends up taking away from our efficiency at work the next day. Let me read a quote from Cal Newport's book Deep Work, love that book that explains this a lot better than I am right now.

“If you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to email or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you're robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur.

“Only the confidence that you're done with work until the next day could convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out od your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.”

If you have been a faithful listener on this podcast, then you know I love a good shutdown routine. Cal Newport talks about this, it's so cheesy, but just hang with me if you haven't. I'm just saying this for my friends who haven't heard this before. If you have regular work hours, at the end of those hours, have a little shutdown complete routine.

You write down everything you're supposed to do for the next day. You scan your emails for anything urgent, you kind of close all your tabs, finish everything out, and then you close your computer and you say out loud, shut down, complete. So, so cheesy, I get it. But also it signals to your brain like, I'm done,

I'm done with work for the day. I can just be with my family and that's what you want. I can rest. I don't have to be working in that working part of my brain anymore. And it allows your brain to really rest and catch up. So that's kind of the side of multitasking, why it's hard and why our brain isn't really made for it.

I'm gonna just pause here and acknowledge something that many of you moms are already thinking like you are probably eyerolling me so hard because you're like good, good for you Nancy. But like my children interrupt me about 10,000 times a day and I'm just here to say, me too, me too. This is why mothers are incredible because our brains aren't made to multitask and yet it often is required of us.

I have talked so often with my sister and my friends recently just about of about the amount of interruptions that we have in any given day from our children. And I just wanna say we are constantly interrupted. Our brains are tired. Not to mention we're probably sleep-deprived and so our brains aren't functioning at full capacity anyway. And that is just the beautiful sacrifice of motherhood that is messy and hard.

And so sometimes when we try to singletask in motherhood and we are trying to be good and honor our brains and do what we can, it's just pointless because we're just gonna get interrupted. And all I can say to that is that is a lesson from the Lord to just keep dying to ourselves and serving our families.

And one day when the kids are a little bit older, we'll be able to control things a little bit more and do things one at a time. But especially, especially for moms who have infants and little babies, our brains are just living on like hyperdrive all the time because you have to stop every three hours to feed your baby and you're constantly interrupted by toddlers to come wipe them and feed them and clean up after them is is just a lot.

So I just wanna say moms, you know, we're doing some tough work and it's a beautiful thing to just die to yourself and serve your family. But when you can even in little ways implement some single tasking, some one thing at a time, like an approach to a schedule or your day, it will, it will help if you can because single tasking is just a less stressful way to live.

It helps you prioritize, you get the things done that are most important, and then you move on to the next thing. And it also allows for just more creative ideas to flow for your home and your family and your work. And yeah, it's just so good to be able to do one thing at a time and really rest.

And so my encouragement for you today, whether you're a mom or not, is just try to find little ways to not multitask, to do one thing at a time, to single task in your work and in your play. So it's gonna make your work so much more fulfilling if you can really knock out projects one at a time and it's gonna make your play so much more fulfilling if you are all there when you're playing.

So here's a couple of tips that I have for you. If you struggle with this or if you feel like “I don't even know how to do this” or “I'm all over the place because I'm constantly interrupted and life is just crazy”, here's what I wanna share with you. Just try one of these things this week.

1. Use a timer.

Y'all know I love a good timer.

I have mine off Amazon. It's called the Time Timer. I used it today. It's a visual timer I use for my kids. Every morning before you go to school, you, you turn it and it shows you in red how many minutes are left. It goes up to 60 minutes. But use a timer. Use a timer if you have to work on cleaning the kitchen and see if you can do it in 20 minutes.

Like set a time goal for yourself. Use a timer for working out, right? Just do something. Go outside for 30 minutes, get a good run in or work workout in any way that you can. Use a timer so that you can be fully present and say, I'm not gonna touch my phone, I'm not gonna be interrupted. Even if it's just 10 minutes.

I love to set a timer for 10 minutes and play with my kid, one kid at a time, 10 minutes at a time saying, I have, you have my full attention babe. Like let's play. You get to choose what it is. It just fills up their little cups so much and it's just really, really sweet because I feel like I've given them my undivided attention, even if it's just for a little bit of time.

2. Make a list of priorities for that day and stick with it.

Try to do the most important things first.

3. Time Blocking.

Try to do the most important things first. priorities list. But just block out your day and time so that you can focus on, I dunno, different themes or different things that you wanna work on and how much time you're allotting to those things.

4. Close everything down.

If you're working and you're on your computer, quit every other app, like close everything else down. Even something simple as like if you're writing, enter into full screen mode so that you can't even see anything else that's going on in your computer. And then just put it on to not disturb. And even allow this time management to flow into you teaching your kids.

It's part of just raising them up and teaching them kind of a better way to do things like, hey, there are boundaries in life and we can all do so much better if we all focus on cleaning the playroom together for 15 minutes and give it our very best. But then after 15 minutes is over, we're done. You know, that's like singletasking.

We're all doing this one thing and we're working really, really hard. But then there's a time limit to it. Or hey, when mommy's on the phone or when mommy's working, like, please don't interrupt and wait till I say that you can talk to me. Or when we have quiet time, we play as much as we want, as freely as we want, but we play quietly until the timer's over.

So just trying to teach your kids like to do one thing at a time. And even for you look for ways to single task even within your work or the things that you have to do or in your household. I mean, there's always a long list of household projects that we have to do.

Just making sure that we tackle one thing at a time and give yourself grace if, if you have a baby that's crying, if you need to stop and deal with an argument or a fight in your family, don't keep unloading the dishwasher in the name of single tasking. And I'll get to that when the dishwasher's done.

I'm just gonna say, I could totally fall in that camp sometimes 'cause I'm like, I just wanna finish this thing. Pause, take care of the kids. Remember that relationships and people are the most important thing always and honoring the Lord even when it's hard, even when you have to interrupt what what it is that you're doing, like that's the most important thing.

But as much as we can manage our time wisely, and as much as we are able to do one things at a time, it's just gonna create an environment where you are better at everything. You're better at working, you're better at playing, you're better at being present and being where your feet are.

Thanks for listening to work and play with Nancy Ray, episode 206. Everything I've said today can be found in the show notes at nancyray.com/podcast/206. And you can find me @nancyray on Instagram or at nancyray.com.

If you are interested in the Mastermind or the new Work and Play membership that I mentioned at beginning of this episode, I just wanted to encourage you head to nancyray.com/mastermind, learn a little bit more about it, see if it's a good fit for you. Take the time to either get on the wait list or apply. I'm already praying for the women who are gonna be part of the Mastermind.

I'm really excited to see what God is gonna do there. And also, like I said, if it's not a great time for you, that's no problem, head to patreon.com/workandplay. That is gonna be a lot of the same content that I'll be going through in the Mastermind, but you'll just be able to do it yourself at your own pace and get monthly encouragement from me there.

Cal Newport said,