Jet Lag

One very minor upside to the social distancing quarantines we've been under for two weeks now:  I can find time to start writing again.

Week three of social isolation is underway, a long enough time that I can start to draw some conclusions about my "old" life.  I already wonder if I will ever go back to a daily driving commute--this walk up the stairs after breakfast is a lot less stressful than a typical Atlanta rush hour, and my productivity certainly hasn't dropped and might even be higher.  Most of my work days are spent on the phone and computer anyway, and my department is spread across the country, so it should have been predictable that remote working isn't that much different from office working for me.  (I'm lucky that my kids are old enough to be self sufficient at their home schooling, and that I have a wife who doesn't work outside the home and keeps the household running flawlessly.)

On the unpredictable side, I have been most surprised to find that I'm sleeping each night much better than I was before the lockdown.  Not more, necessarily, but better, deeper, more restorative sleep.  I have changed nothing else in my diet or routine to deliberately chase sleep; I would have though I was sleeping soundly before.  But the difference is enough to be noticeable, and I've been reflecting on why this could be.  The best idea I've had is that it corresponds to the sudden shutdown of my usual peripatetic travel schedule.  Is it possible I had been living in a steady state of jet lag?

I was not regularly jet-lagged in the traditional sense of my body clock being off by a few time zones.  Most of my business travel takes place in my home EST time zone or the neighboring CST that is one hour behind.  But what my travel lacked in distance was perhaps made up for in frequency:  according to Delta, I flew 83 flight segments in 2019, which is over 40 round trips.  Thanks to the fact that my home airport, ATL, is the busiest in the world with direct flights to dozens of cities, I am fortunate to frequently be able to make day trips for meetings.  Sometimes I might have two days like that in a week; occasionally they will be back-to-back so that I get home late one evening then get up early the next morning and head straight back to the airport.  Sometimes the return flights are late, so that I get to bed an hour or two later than normal.  In between trips, there are regular work days and kids activities and social outings, etc.  Many of us know what this business (or "busy-ness") looks like--and many have it worse than I do.

For three weeks now, all of this has come to a sudden and complete halt.  No rushing around, no extra  activities, no flights.  Instead, our family has settled into a fairly steady routine, with fairly regular meal times, a little outdoor exercise each day, and to bed at about the same time every night.  Some of what we've lost in outside socializing we are making up with family time together, playing games and watching movies.  And presto, I'm sleeping more deeply than I have in years.

My conclusion:  I was jet lagged--not so much by actual jet travel, but by the incessant activity that seems to be the steady state operating model for most American professionals and their families.  I wasn't always crossing time zones, but I was compressing and shifting my perception of time through constant motion of mind and body.  Now, without all that rushing around, my mind has finally caught up with my body, I'm sleeping better, and I feel great.

So here's what I'm contemplating as I sit at home:  in two weeks or two months or whenever the social distancing protocols begin to relax and "normal" life begins to restart, how far back to the old ways will I allow myself to get?  I can't, and don't want to, stay sequestered at home forever--monasticism is not for me, and I'm too young to retire.  But is there a point somewhere between sheltering in place and the restless rush of relentless motion that would find me contributing fully to my job, home, and community, while still allowing me to sleep very well at night?  I wonder.

Yes, You Do Have Limits

Leo Babauta of zen habits posted a thoughtful and helpful reminder of one of the core principles of Present Tense Living: we have limits, therefore we can't do everything. Don't get so busy trying do it all, have it all, or be it all, that you fail to appreciate the what you already do, or have, or are.

This day is special. Make it a good one!

Forget Mustitasking

All of us are tempted to multitask nearly every day. With companies trying to do more with fewer people, the demands of work seem to be relentlessly increasing. If you have kids their schedules are packed too, and you have to be involved in that activity while managing your own affairs. Then there is the information stream we try to keep up with: news sites, blogs, Facebook updates, Twitter feeds. It is a lot of busyness, and so no wonder we are tempted to text while driving, to email while eating, and to exercise while talking on the phone.

But evidently we are fooling ourselves. On NPR's Morning Edition program today, Renee Montagne interviewed Douglas Merrill, the former CIO of Google who holds a PhD in Cognitive Science, and who recently published Getting Organized in the Google Era. According to Dr. Merrill, we are fooling ourselves when we think we can multitask:

Everyone feels like they're tremendous multitaskers. It's a little like Lake Wobegon - everyone thinks they're better than average, but you're not. You can't multitask. When you shift from one context to another you're going to drop some things. And what that means is that you're less effective at the first task and at the second task that you're trying to do at the same time. It's much more effective to spend time doing your first task, take a small break, and then do your second task. Managing the context shift is much more effective than pretending to multitask, even though we all think we're good at it.

When he says "you can't", what he means is your brain is not set up to operate that way:

Your brain has a short-term memory which it uses to store the things that happen around it in the world, and then it takes from that short-term memory and encodes into long-term memory so you can find it later. That short-term memory can hold between five and nine things and that's all. And if you're multitasking, you're more likely to forget the things that are in that short-term memory.

So, it turns out we are all fooling ourselves when we think we can get more done by doing two or more things at once. It is a false victory: we seem to do more, but in the end we do it poorly, or we forgot what we did, or we forget to do all the things we are supposed to do. Plus, Dr. Merrill goes on to say, the constant switching our attention back and forth between different contexts is actually a time-waster.

Far better, as he says, to do one thing at a time, take a short break to reset your brain, and then start on the next task. Focus on what you are doing right now--live in the present tense, we might say--and do it to the best of your ability. Of course, doing that doesn't lessen the flood of information, tasks, emails, and other demands on our time; so we have to be deliberate about setting priorities, saying no when possible, and otherwise taking control of our own lives to ensure we are accomplishing the truly important (as you can read about elsewhere on this blog).

I haven't read the book yet, but from the review it appears there might be some interesting tips and tools that Dr. Merrill suggests for helping manage all that information flow. Let me know if you've read it, and what you think.