The Multitasking Fallacy
Focus, be intentional, be present. And close one drawer before you open the next.
In this first installment of The Advice Column (yes, still nameless!), I’m inspired to share a simple question posed by an aspiring physician entrepreneur who reached out to hear about my experience of stepping away from the comfort of clinical medicine and into the wild world of entrepreneurship. You know these conversations fill my cup! As questions go, it was a pretty dang straightforward inquiry and really shouldn’t have been a stumper. He asked:
What’s one thing you wish you had learned earlier?
But the question caught me. Lord knows, I’ve spent many an hour reflecting on countless lessons learned from the ups and downs of my AbleTo years. Some of you have even heard me liken the early startup days to being on rowboat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean during a tsunami. Phew, it ain’t easy, but if you come out on the other side of that experience, trust me, you have learned a thing or two! So what surprised me most was my desire in that moment not to answer his query with a string of business learnings, but with something far more personal. Here’s how I responded:
I wish I’d learned earlier how to be more present.
Now I’m not one spend a lot of energy on regret. I find it generally doesn’t serve me well. I’d rather look upon past experiences as opportunities for reflection and learning. As the unexpectedly wise pop star Tate McRae sings, “it is what it is and it was what it was.” So, no, I wouldn’t say that I regret that I spent 110% of my emotional energy on AbleTo in the early days, at the expense of everything else, but I have definitely learned important lessons from that imperfect way of being that allowed me to shift how I carried myself in the later years at AbleTo and how I live (or try to live…) today.
In that intense early stage, we were all juggling all the balls all the time, doing whatever it took to keep the AbleTo ship afloat and sailing forward. AbleTo swallowed up all my brain space. I suppose it’s not unexpected when you’re just 10 people, you love the work, and you so deeply believe in the mission. What that also required though was a shift in the way our family lived. I was newly on the road easily two to three days a week, whether in the NYC office or frankly wherever I was needed to meet with clients, woo investors, or preach the good word of AbleTo. At the time, my kids were just 9 and 5 years old, soon to start 4th grade and kindergarten. My husband was and is still an interventional cardiologist, so there was the not-so-small matter of navigating my travel and his STEMI call. Needless to say, if growing a company was a juggling act, home was a juggling act on a unicycle with an industrial strength fan blowing in your face. My brain and my heart always felt like they were in too many places at once.
Many years ago, I attended a women’s leadership talk (“Lift As You Climb,” a title I adore for a trillion reasons!) given by Wendy Clark, at the time a star global marketing executive at Coca-Cola and one of Fortune Magazine’s “Women to Watch.” When the topic of work and life and balance arose, you could see her visibly cringe. Balance felt so utterly unobtainable. Instead, she encouraged listeners to find a way to integrate the puzzle pieces of work and life together. The key factor was illustrated by an immensely powerful analogy she shared about being present that I have carried with me to this day.
She asked us to envision a chest of drawers, like one of those vintage dressers with a few dozen drawers or one of those classic library card catalog cabinets from the era before computers. Open too many drawers at once, and you risk the entire dang thing tipping over altogether. It’s unsafe, and it’s unsustainable. And remember too that the drawers aren’t all weighted the same. The husband drawer and the patients drawer and the boss drawer do not all produce the same risk of tipping over!
So say you have the client meeting “drawer” open and the working-on-that-deck-for-investors drawer open and the boss-is-calling-on-my-cell drawer open. You can’t then open the my-husband-texting-about-what-we-are-gonna-have-for-dinner drawer, though it seems benign enough! Trust me, I love that man, and I adore making dinner for my family (they all know that food is my love language, after all), but opening this drawer in that exact moment when all those others drawers are also open is seriously unwise. It will break you. You will tip over!
You have to close one drawer before you open a new one. Though it may be painfully obvious, it bears repeating. Simple, but definitely not easy. And personally, it took me a long while to really hear the message and put it into practice.
I wish I’d learned earlier how to be more present.
What I knew intuitively, but struggled to implement in real life was that a) not all priorities are created equal (recall the classic parable about the rocks, pebbles, sand filling the jar) and b) it is critically important to be present and fully in the moment wherever you are and whomever you are with. Put your phone down. Close your computer (or other computer windows). Lift your eyes. Your presence is an absolute gift (a present!) to those around you. But it’s also not limitless. Dole it out wisely, purposefully, and with intention.
Multitasking in life and in work turns out to be a modern day fallacy. Work-life balance is like a dangling, unobtainable carrot. Our minds are not really wired to do a trillion things at once. Our hearts are not truly full when we try to be everything everywhere all at once.
Focus, be intentional, be present. Close one drawer before you open the next.
That’s one thing of many things I wish I’d learned earlier.
4 ways to support
3 additional resources and readings
More from Wendy Clark in a Forbes interview Mastering The Myth of Work-Life Balance.
An article on attention management in The New York Times from organizational behavior expert Adam Grant.
From The Atlantic, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy One, exploring research from Matthew Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert from Harvard on how frequently our minds wander (47%!) and the impact on our happiness.
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For everything else, including requests for speaking engagements, you can reach me at reena@pandemd.com.
Awesome as always Reena. I was recently asked by someone starting a company “would you be my mentor?” I responded by saying that I would be delighted to spend time getting to know him and sharing whatever I could to assist him in his work and would ask the same in return. We could talk as frequently as needed without a “scheduled 1:1” and overtime we could decide what to call our relationship, assuming it needed a label…whether he elects me to his personal BOD (and I love that concept…) only time will tell but that is far from my objective for all the reasons your thoughtful post articulates.
This post got some creative energies flowing and potential names for this substack came to mind: the Pande Perspective, Reena’s Rounds, or Pulse on Prosperity (who doesn’t love a good alliteration!)