You can look at your life as a series of actions or activities that occur at both regular and random times.
If you are in the army or any other rigidly structured organization, many of your activities will be rigidly scheduled, and the schedules will be enforced. You will receive constant reminders of the tasks you should be performing. When you work in an office environment, your activities are similarly controlled regularly.
While raising a family, your activities are more likely to be interrupt-driven, and the level of randomness is often quite high. Trying to live on any kind of regular schedule is quite a challenge, as children and pets can provide interruptions for almost every activity.
If you are retired and/or living alone, your activities are mainly interrupt-driven. You may think you are managing your life and letting things occur as they will, but that is not what happens at all. You think you can eat, sleep, and work when you choose, but almost every activity is triggered by some external or internal event. You are constantly interrupted by phone calls, emails, when you have a visitor, or when your body sends you a signal that it is hungry, thirsty, or needs to relieve itself or sleep.
As a result, you can become reliant on these interrupts and never think to prioritize their handling. All of your actions are made in response to the interruptions from your environment, and you find yourself being constantly interrupted and losing track of what you are doing. This manifests itself as you needing something from the kitchen and heading in that direction, but getting distracted by a letter on the desk, arriving in the kitchen, and not remembering why you wanted to be there. You can be further interrupted by the dishes in the sink and end up loading the dishwasher and not knowing how you got there.
A more common interruption happens when you attempt to check your email. As you open your browser, you see a notice or a video that catches your eye, and you find yourself scrolling through fascinating Instagram videos instead of attending to your emails.
The solution to this continuing dispersal is to establish a general handling for interrupts such that once you are triggered, you do not allow yourself to be interrupted until that task is done, unless there is a higher priority interrupt occurring. In addition, whenever you are triggered by an interruption, you make note of what you are doing so you can return to that same point when you have handled the interruption.
This means that you need to look at the interrupts you encounter frequently and prioritize them, so only important ones will interrupt the tasks you do most frequently. You should develop quick handlings for interrupts that can be deferred, and these can be simple categories like ignore permanently, ignore until later, make a note to remember, and mark as important to take up next or soon.
Once you decide to handle your interruptions, document your handlings so you won’t forget them and review what you have documented frequently until you have established a working system for dealing with life’s events.
If you ever find yourself stalled and wondering what you were supposed to be doing, repeat this process and fix the errors and missing decisions. If you find yourself forgetting things and names for things, places, and people, you need to repeat this process and see how you arrived at this point of confusion.
The acid test is whether your attention is on the present moment or the past while you are doing things. If you find yourself doing active things while dreaming of past events, you are not in control of your thoughts, and you need to orient yourself in the present moment.
It is possible to multitask while doing chores, but it means that your attention is dispersed and you are not giving your task the attention it deserves. It also means that you are listening to more than one spirit at a time. Does this sound like a good idea?
I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this matter.
David St Lawrence