slow down & do it right - aug.12

my wife and I are cleaning our windows today - first time in years and boy are they dirty!
it has taken us this long because, like you, we are 'too' busy. yup - guilty as charged. somehow even though i work part time and have the summers off [being a HS teacher] i am too busy! so now, as I try to 'walk the talk' as the GPO candidate for the upcoming provincial election, i will try to be an example of one aspect of living 'GREEN' - living slower by doing one thing at a time and doing it right.
This is tough for me, tough for you, and even tougher for the young generation who have been brainwashed into thinking that multi-tasking is 'efficient' and you get more done , faster. False! According to recent research ( http://www.whatsbestnext.com/2011/07/when-multitasking-is-not-a-good-idea/ ) : "
A rash of recent studies shows that multitasking is not a solution. In fact, studies show that multitasking is actually a misnomer. While we think we are multitasking, we are actually task switching, doing a little bit of one thing and then doing a little bit of another. Our brains just won’t allow us to perform two complex operations at the same time with the same skill. Quality necessarily suffers, as does depth. Not only that, but multitasking is not even very efficient. David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, found that “people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50 percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them separately, completing one before starting the other.”
Meanwhile, if we surround ourselves by too many stimuli, we force our brains into a state of continuous partial attention, a state in which we keep tabs on everything without giving focused attention to anything. . . .
Whether through multitasking or through monitoring so many sources of input that we remain in continuous partial attention, we lose the ability to think in a sustained way."
There you have it. On top of this research finding life experience has taught me, against my natural inclination as I usually do everything FAST, that doing that ONE thing SLOWER is essential to do the job properly. Or, as the folk wisdom says: "A stitch in time saves nine."Here is a concrete example.
Yesterday I did not close the outer gate to my chicken yard. I was busy in the house and our younger dog was very bored -so she got into trouble, of course. She went to the inner fence by the chicken coop and dug a hold under the fencing and all the chickens escaped. Later, as I was rushing (!) out the door for dinner I saw the chickens, had to repair the hold, try to corral the chickens in, finally walk the dog.. and was thus an hour late for dinner.
So, simply not slowing down, and focussing on the task at hand, in this case closing a gate, cost my an hour of work and hassle.
So today, let all of us do what we know.
Slow down.
Do one thing at a time.
And do that one thing properly.