The lost art of single-tasking
by Kellie Brown
Image by Tugba Ozturk for Pexels
On a Thursday in August, I drank a cup of coffee without letting it grow cold. That never happens. I never allow it to. I pour a cup of coffee and try to complete as many tasks as I can while waiting for it to reach a drinkable temperature. Honestly, my coffee is sometimes cold before I can pull away from my productivity to savor that first taste.
But on that particular Thursday, I drank a large cup, singularly focused on that as the necessary task of the moment. This change didn’t result from a conscious choice or mindfulness exercise. Instead, it coincided with my first terrifying week of in-person teaching at the university since the start of the pandemic, and I was enrolled in a crash course in the art of single-tasking.
I’m not surprised that this consequential message was conveyed to me via a cup of coffee. This richly aromatic beverage is an essential ingredient in my life. Its caffeinated brew kickstarts my mornings, while its decaf version often bridges the time between dinner and bed, the warm mug nestling in my hands as a comfort against Thomas’s dying of the light. Coffee also serves as a prompt and integral accompaniment to my work and creative process. Whether I’m writing essays, preparing a lecture, or grading research papers, a steaming mug feels essential and is why I frequently tote my messenger bag to the nearest coffee shop.
The coffeehouse is the type of location that American sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined a “third place,” a space for gathering that is neither home (“first place”) nor work (“second place”). In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg emphasizes the important role third places, such as cafés, parks, and public libraries, play in our lives. While the coffeehouse represents an ideal location for enjoying a delicious beverage and catching up with a dear friend, I confess that, like many, I see them predominately as satellite workstations, a place to take my laptop and connect to free Wi-Fi. Sitting there can fuel the same productivity-driven, multi-tasking urge in me, just with different scenery and a better multi-sensory experience. My cup of coffee, which is considerably more expensive than my home brew, also grows cold there.
Technology, which was supposed to free us up for more leisure time, has only caused us to become more impatient and more fixated on the passing of time. Even the slightest delay, as in a text hovering in the sending mode or a web page struggling to load, feels unbearable to me. Technology has also ignited our obsession with efficiency, and thus offered us multi-tasking as a remedy. From the phone in my hand, I make dinner reservations, read the news headlines, confirm a dentist appointment, check baseball scores, and order a replacement water filter, all while participating in an online meeting and listening for the buzzer on the clothes dryer.
An ad in 1902 for the Remington typewriter declared this motto—“To save time is to lengthen life.” But over 100 years later, this isn’t true. All the time-saving devices haven’t given us more life— they have confined us in the prison of productivity. I now have more ways for work to encroach on my life than when I first began teaching over 25 years ago. Work tempts and teases me via email and text, through pop-up calendar reminders and meeting invites, from course management software and task flow apps. With this ease of work accessibility comes the imperative for firmer work-life boundaries, a demarcation line I rarely enforce.
The problem is not how we spend our time but the way we assign value to it. We save time…invest time…buy time…borrow time…waste time. And it’s not a recent phenomenon. Jonathan Swift called attention to our fixation with time in the early 18th century. Gulliver’s watch fascinates the Lilliputians. Having never seen anything like it, they can’t begin to fathom its function except to conclude that it must be his god since “he very seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.” They might say the same about me and the internet, an online oracle I rely on for both direction and distraction. I worry about the number of times in any given hour that I reach for my phone to check my online relationship with the world. My tolerance of sitting empty-handed, in peaceful inactivity, has diminished markedly since I bought my first smart phone.
Fred Rogers taught generations of children, including mine, many valuable life lessons such as how to be a good neighbor, how to discover joy through curiosity, and how to hold space for all kinds of feelings. He also offered his insights on time, particularly encouraging us “to like taking our time.” That is the lesson I have struggled with the most. When Mister Rogers sang, “I like to take my time,” my response was, and still is, “Wait. What? Are you serious?” He wanted to give us the gift of valuing the process rather than the product, and more importantly of enjoying spending time with ourselves. But slowing down frightens me. I am afraid of what seemingly lies abandoned as I fully attend to the moment. I am afraid that a gentler pace is somehow the slippery slope to laziness. Taking time to savor a meal, or answer an email, or grade a paper feels self-indulgent, a luxury I couldn't afford growing up with a narcissistic mother. As a child, I was the industrious one in our home, even from a young age. I kept the house clean and schedules running on time. Although my child’s mind couldn’t have articulated it, I realized instinctively that my inactivity would lead to chaos and precarity in my life, that I would be less safe. So, I learned to fear laziness. Shifting that perspective, allowing myself to take up not only physical but temporal space, is an ongoing part of my healing process.
Another difficulty with Mister Rogers’s aspiration is, of course, that I possess an internal timer set to a finite number that continuously ticks backwards. Maybe the realization of my mortality is the catalyst that sets me on my time-obsessed course. Unlike glancing at my oven’s timer display, I can’t know how much of my individual lifespan remains, not to mention how global events fuel fear of humanity’s impending collective demise. What if I never read all the books on my shelves, or cook all the recipes in my folder, or visit all the places on my bucket list? I’m afraid of arriving at a point in my life when I realize that I have sacrificed the simple pleasures of life in order to be productive. I imagine the overwhelming sense of regret that a realization like that could bring. So, it's not surprising that I frantically try to gather up time even as it races and resists, slipping through my hands like grains of sand.
In her book World Enough & Time, Christian McEwen, a practitioner of slowing down, notes that the ever-increasing pace of human existence can be detected throughout most aspects of our life including language. She reveals that 16,000 words that were once hyphenated, like pigeon-hole, have been combined into one word (pigeonhole). Angus Stevenson, the editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, provides her with the explanation that “we no longer have time to reach over to the hyphen key.” I no longer have time to drink a hot cup of coffee, as my repeated trips to the microwave will attest to. I have failed to follow the advice of Kate Chopin in The Awakening— “Don’t stir all the warmth out of your coffee, drink it.” That I spend more time reheating my coffee than it would have taken to drink it initially is as illogical as it is habitual. Our endeavors to save time, even to the extent of short-changing ourselves by mere seconds, may actually propel us to the brink of nothingness.
I think the danger lies in the insidious nature of our busyness. The burden of too many duties and responsibilities eases onto us gradually. We don more and more hats and too easily acclimate to the new one. Soon it seems normal, routine, and even inevitable. Sometimes I feel like the peddler in the 1940 classic children's book Caps for Sale. He meticulously balances the gray, brown, blue, and red caps on his head and walks carefully to keep them in check. But when he grows tired and sits under a tree for a nap, monkeys wreak havoc with his many, well-intentioned caps.
Despite how I might rail against my own caps and monkeys, I admit to readily embracing this overburdened “hustle culture” and proudly wearing that multi-tasking badge of honor, all while holding myself to impossibly high standards. As a performer, I practice to stay in peak shape on the violin and with the conductor’s baton. As a writer, I want to corral words into meaningful and publishable thoughts. As a teacher, I desire to equip and inspire my students. All these professional responsibilities inevitably overlay my personal roles as mother, wife, daughter, and friend. Regrettably, as I juggle these personas, I also quietly, or not so quietly, pass judgement on other people’s failure to wear as many hats or to cross off as many items on The To Do List. I think my mind projects the same fears I have for myself and declares them lazy or selfish. And woe to anyone who doesn’t keep a list. How could they be so irresponsible and inefficient considering all that must be accomplished? Don’t they realize that their inattention makes more work for the rest of us?
But the pandemic forced what used to be automatic activities into a series of calculated steps with the potential of life-saving ramifications. Like so many tasks, getting groceries became a choreographed process as I ordered them online, drove my car to the pick-up line, and then wiped down the packaging with whatever disinfectant I could find. The presence of an invisible contagion caused me to slow down and to be more mindful, more deliberate, in my routines, including with the arrival of the mail. Cautious about surface contamination, I created quarantine piles of letters and packages, each with a sticky note on top telling me what date I could open them. Every day I visited whichever was the three-day old pile and opened each carefully, almost reverently, like an Advent calendar window.
I had certainly wanted, and needed, to incorporate mindfulness practices into my daily life and had successfully done so at certain moments. But with 2020, desire morphed into necessity. As an immune compromised person, I felt the full weight of what COVID-19 meant. My husband and I isolated, not even risking a visit with our son or parents. All the uncertainties about how the virus spread and how to protect ourselves overwhelmed me. What I feared most, what made me break out in a cold sweat, was the thought that it might become safe for most people to resume normal life, but never be safe again for me. Almost equally traumatic for me was seeing how many people selfishly refused to wear masks or take other public health precautions. While healthcare and frontline workers made courageous sacrifices, the voices of those ready to sacrifice the elderly and the vulnerable for the sake of a haircut or a meal inside a restaurant reverberated at a deafening volume in my ear. So, the fact that amid all that, a needed lesson in mindfulness via a cup of coffee came to me remains one of the rare positive outcomes in my life from that time.
A recent reading of Toshikazu Kawaguchi's haunting 2019 novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold has provided me a fresh perspective on time, and on choices, and even on coffee. In a remote café in the back alleys of Tokyo, a unique table exists, where for over one hundred years, a person could sit with a specially brewed cup of coffee and be transported back to any moment in the past. This venture is not without complexities, however, including several stringent rules that must be followed. The most critical of which is that the time-traveler can only remain in the past for as long as their coffee is warm. They must drink the entire cup before it grows cold or face irreparable consequences. Throughout the course of the novel, I agonized alongside each person as they decided whether to revisit their past. For those who did choose to travel back, whatever solace or insight they received came tinged with heartbreak as they eyed the steam drifting from the cup and realized how little time remained. I couldn’t help but wonder how I would react if faced with this choice. Is there a time in the past so precious or so unresolved that I believe revisiting it for even a few minutes would improve my current life? I would love to sit again on the piano bench with my grandmother as she plays from her shape-note hymnal or to bury my nose into the sweet-smelling hair of my infant son. I think I would desire to reexperience the past through my senses rather than to position myself at the threshold of a major life event.
Wrestling with a choice, the weighing of pros and cons as the novel’s characters do, is something we can all relate to, even if it is about more quotidian decisions than the option of time travel. Despite the lessons I have learned since 2020, the choices of how to allot my time remain haunted by productivity and efficiency. This is how I am often caught in the trap of multi-tasking, except now I have another option. What if, instead, I hit the pause button on my productivity-driven mind and carry that steaming cup of coffee to the porch, and stare into the horizon, and listen to birdsong, even though or in spite of not having unloaded the dishwasher, or folded the laundry, or answered the latest barrage of emails?
I long to create Thoreau’s “margins,” a freedom of time that leads to easy, spacious days. I want to experience time as so abundant that there is no need to rush, that even my breaths can be recalibrated to slower and deeper inhalations. And yet, I’m under no delusion that I am cured from multi-tasking, nor that I need to be or want to be. I can affirm that I’m looking forward to more moments of fully engaging with the single task at hand. I also plan to remind myself that living life is not what gets to happen after completing the items on The List; it is The List.
Dr. Kellie Brown (she/her) is a violinist, music educator, and award-winning writer whose book, The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation During the Holocaust and World War II received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award. Her words have appeared in Writerly, Ekstasis, Galway Review, and others.
Visit Kellie’s website