Nicholas Zakas' Personal Blog A deviation from my usual tech writing

Be here now

The words rattled out of my high school music director's mouth as I and a few dozen other adolescents were off in our own worlds when we should have been rehearsing. Vic was an excellent music director, a tall man with gray hair and a mustache who always wore a handkerchief around his neck. No one would ever mistakenly believe that he had a job outside of the performing arts. He addressed each of us by our character names, not by our real names;  we were our characters for the 2-3 hours of rehearsal time and he made sure we knew it.

"Be here now," he would exclaim whenever the group lost focus. Which was frequent because, of course, we were teenagers. "We all have other things to worry about, but while you're here, focus on what we're trying to do. Leave your baggage at the door of the auditorium - you can pick it back up on your way out."

We all would refocus for at least a short period of time. That's really about all you can expect from high school kids who are all hanging around after class to sing showtunes and perform jazz squares in front of their friends. Years later, in my profession as a technologist, the lesson I didn't quite understand at 16 has become incredibly clear.

Being a technologist leads to meeting other technologists. They can introduce you to more technologists and before you know it, you're surrounded by them every single moment. Technologists are great: intelligent and opinionated and frequently lacking the eloquence to deliver his or her thoughts in a way that is palatable to those around them. And they love their toys. Specifically, the type of toys that are powered by microchips and connected to the Internet.

Technologists also tend to pride themselves on being excellent multitaskers. Why just watch TV when I could also be doing my taxes, following Twitter, and updating my Facebook status? Look at everything I can accomplish in the time you're just doing one thing! Thus, the iPhone became a must-have accessory for technologists due to its enabling of this behavior everywhere. Gone were the days when one might stand in line and start a conversation with the person in front of you. In its place, a line of multiple people each hunched over with a little black box in their hand trying to see what else is going on in the world. One might say that these people are everywhere but here now.

We feel that all this multitasking makes us more efficient. Yet studies are starting to show that ours brains are just not wired to  handle this type of processing. In fact, the more multitasking that you do, the worse your performance becomes. Even though we feel superior for accomplishing many things at a time, we're actually performing these tasks at a lower level than those who are shuffling fewer tasks. What's more, there is a high correlation between those who multitask and those who suffer from anxiety. It appears that the brain just doesn't like constant context switching to keep up with doing multiple things at once.

If you look at the computer screen of the average software engineer, you'll likely see the following:

1. Instant message client
2. Twitter client
3. Web browser (for Facebook, personal email, etc.)
4. Text editor (for writing code)
5. Mail client (for business email)

Some others might augment their desktop with additional information about weather or stocks. I know that I found myself switching attention between these, plus my stock ticker, constantly throughout the day. I felt like the day was moving incredibly fast and I was fighting to keep up. Switching back and forth furiously I started to find that I was missing important details. As it turns out, this is very common among multitaskers.

Last year, I made a decision to start making my daily workload easier: I stopped checking personal email during weekdays. That was one less thing I needed to do at work while I should be, you know, doing work. A lot of my friends rolled their eyes, some were angry that I wouldn't be responding immediately, and almost all thought I could never do it. Now, a year and a half later, people just know that this is the way I deal with personal email. What I found most interesting in my experience was how my life felt almost instantly less stressful. One less thing to do. Phew.

I later had a discussion about this with my friend Nicole as she explained her growing frustration with the amount of things she had to do. She had started taking a mindfulness meditation class and really enjoyed it (she then wrote about it on her blog). Around the same time I happened to see Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows (a book about our multitasking Internet culture) on the Colbert Report. He mentioned that the more we multitask, the worse we get at deep thinking. I know this because I have the video playing in the corner of my monitor while I'm writing this post.

Since then, I've been actively trying to limit the amount of multitasking I do. When my stock ticker mysteriously stopped working on my desktop, I just removed it instead of trying to fix it. The same with my Twitter client. My stress level started to drop. At home, I stopped eating in front of the TV, instead sitting at the dinner table. I made lists of tasks to complete and made sure that they were listed in priority order so I could read from top-to-bottom and focus on each individual task. When I'm writing, I now keep my IM client closed and force myself to finish the article before moving on to something else. And whenever I catch myself multitasking, I whisper, "be here now."

The technologists with whom I work are frequently not here now. I firmly believe that in order to do the best job possible, you must be able to focus on whatever is happening now. It enrages me to no end when a meeting starts and everyone is on their laptops doing something else. There is no way that meeting can be anything close to productive. Arguments about whether or not there should be a meeting in the first place aside, if you're in a meeting, you should be paying complete attention so that you can get out of the meeting as quickly as possible. The only time I bring a computer to a meeting is when I'm presenting. Any other time I carry with me a notepad and pen.

If I'm running a meeting, I usually ask everyone to close their laptops and put away their iPhones before we get started. Be here now. All of us. If there's something so important that you can't afford to put your laptop away for the entirety of the meeting, then you really shouldn't be in that meeting - you should be tending to whatever crisis requires your full attention. The interesting thing is that, while people groan, my meetings tend to finish early and achieve their stated goal.

I'm not completely satisfied with my current mode of thinking. Years of multitasking have most assuredly wreaked havoc on my neurons and it will likely take some time to get back into the deep thinking mode. I definitely want to take a mindfulness class and need to continue to work to focus on individual tasks one at a time. In the meantime, I will continue to look for easy ways to eliminate multitasking and continue to whisper to myself, "be here now."