Why Multitasking Stinks

"No wonder we have the attention span of a ferret on a triple cappucino." – James Bryan Smith I've come to a conclusion about what might be one of the most helpful things to do in my efforts to live prayerfully this year: renounce multitasking. Much of what I hope to gain from this year's experiment is an increased ability to pay attention to God and to those around me, and there may be no other socially encouraged practice that works against this as much as trying to accomplish multiple things at once.

Perhaps some people are more wired to be multitaskers than others, and I'm just not one with the wiring for it, but I think there's another level to it. In Live Prayerfully, I talk about how the point of times we have specifically set aside for prayer isn't what happens to us during those times, but how they help us to be prayerful in all of the other parts of our lives. The point of this post is what happens in the other direction: how the way we live during the rest of our lives impacts what we do when we attempt to give our attention to prayer.

It seems like we're blinded to it, but there's a pretty obvious connection between the ways that we intentionally let our attention flit from one thing to another during 90%+ of our waking hours and then find it very difficult to stay focused when we try to give God our attention in five minutes of prayer. The more advanced our technological gadgets become, the higher the number of constant potential distractions and interruptions we always have with us. (Remember in the old days–six or seven years ago– when you actually had to go sit at a computer to check email?)

How prayerful might my life be, if during the +/- 23 hours of the day that I'm doing something other than spending time set aside for prayer, I was committed to only doing one thing at a time? My hunch is that during that 24th hour of the day, my mind, spirit, and body would be able to settle down more easily and give my attention go God–then I would also be able to give better attention to others during the course of a normal day.

So, some ideas for training myself to do one thing at a time for the purpose of increasing my ability to pay attention to God and others:

  • Even while I've been writing this, I changed from my normal on-computer working routine (which almost always includes having at least five programs open simultaneously) to having nothing on my screen except writing this. My computer is very able to do multiple things at once, but perhaps it's not good for me to see more than one of them.
  • I wonder if it's possible for me to regress to those email practices of six or seven years ago and go back to only working on email when at my desk. Of course it's convenient to be able to check and send messages from my phone, but I'd guess that 90% of the times I check email on my phone, I'm not looking for any message in particular–and the ones that come in are almost never things that can't wait. I'm also usually with other people who are more worthy of my attention than those messages that grab my attention. Checking email on my phone is apparently more of a physically ingrained habit than it is a useful activity.
  • One of the quickest ways for me to lose patience with my kids is for me to try to accomplish anything while they're with me and want my attention. Sure, there are times when something has to be done at that moment, but most of the time I have a choice and could easily put my task away (usually something on my phone or computer) and give my attention to my kids instead.

Other ideas?

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Something I've prayed this week:

O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Prayer for Transfiguration Sunday from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is the 20th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]

Live Prayerfully's Kindle Edition is Up

iPad Live PrayerfullyI'm thrilled that one of the versions of Live Prayerfully is now publicly available, as the Kindle Edition posted on Amazon this morning. One big advantage of the electronic editions: Part Two of the book consists of guides for prayer for each day of the week, and I really hope that some folks will find using an electronic version very handy for making use of those guides on a regular basis. Since Kindle books can be read on so many different devices, it helps turn the book's guides for prayer into pocket guides that you can always have with you. (Other e-book versions are also in the works in case anyone has a strong preference for another reader, such as the Nook. The printed edition should be available within a week.)

 

How to Be as Prayerful as You'd Like to Be

I've recently been reading a book on health. It's got lots of good information on nutrition, exercise, and overall health. No one around me would be able to guess that I'm reading it, though, because I have changed absolutely nothing about my health habits while reading it. I'm still eating the way I always have been and continue trying to convince myself that activities like typing on a keyboard or riding around in a pickup truck have a small amount of exercise built into them. The bottom line is that I've been reading this good health information, thinking that the things I read are good ideas and that it would be nice if I ever get around to living that way, but I've been reading them without any intention of doing what they say.

A conversation with Robert last week got me thinking about this in connection with this year's experiment. We were talking about one of our heroes, Dallas Willard, and how he teaches the reliable pattern for change in any area of our lives as VIM: First we need to have the vision of how good such a change would be, then an intention to make the necessary arrangements in our lives to make them conducive to the change, and then we find the most helpful means for allowing the change to happen. The example Dallas often uses is of learning a foreign language. If we can clearly see the benefit of learning a language, we will likely become determined to do so, and then do the things necessary to learn it.

So, for most of my life, I've wanted to be prayerful. Some parts of my life have certainly been more prayerful than others–particularly in the seasons when I discovered the good guidance from others which Live Prayerfully is written to pass along. But also for much of my life, I wanted to be more prayerful than I was. In a vague, subconscious way, I continually looked forward to sometime off in the future when I might become the kind of prayerful person that I'd thought all along it would be nice to be.

I've studied enough of the lives of God's friends through history (including knowing a good number of people who fit that category) that I had a pretty good vision of what the prayerful life might be like. And since I've been able to learn from some very good folks along the way, I've also had great guidance in how to go about different practices of prayer. I had the vision. I had the means. But one piece of Dallas' pattern was missing and kept me from living the kind of prayerful life I had wanted for a long time: I never intended to do so. There was always something else I intended to do with the days right in front of me than to become prayerful.

Honestly, in taking on this experiment for this year, my thinking about it went only so deep as that it would give me things to write about on this blog. But the occasion of making that commitment seems to have been a stumbling, bumbling step over the line of finally letting my intentions genuinely match the vision and means of the prayerful life that had already been given to me by others. I'm extraordinarily blessed to have had others in my life to help put those in place, but the solid, gut-level, established intention was the piece only I could take care of.

(PS: By opening with the example of diet and exercise, I certainly don't want to imply that I'm okay with ignoring my physical life and happy with doing so because I think my spiritual life is in good shape. There are multiple levels on which that would be foolish, including thinking that I have a "physical life" and a "spiritual life." I, like you, just have a life, and it's my responsibility to cooperate with God's grace in each area of it. But something I've observed over the years is that, regardless of how dramatic someone's conversion to God may or may not be, we all learn one lesson at a time and cooperate with his work in one part of our lives before doing so in another. In other words, hopefully the intention is coming about nutrition and exercise one of these days. But–dear God–I hope I don't make a commitment to blog about that for a whole year.)

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Something I've prayed this week:

Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Prayer for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is the 19th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully]

40 Days of Prayer: Daily Emails for Lent

40 Days of Prayer Graphic Cropped

Click here to see later posts in this series.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to write daily emails for Lent this year for my church. The emails will begin on Ash Wednesday, February 13, and conclude on Easter Sunday, March 29. Each day's message will include a short reflection from me, a scripture reading, and a prayer for the day.

If you already subscribe to this blog by email, you will also receive these automatically (since I didn't want to put this much work into writing things and not also have them count as blog posts!). If you don't normally receive new posts by email, but would like to just for Lent this year, you can sign up for the 40 Days of Prayer email list here. Update: This email series was sent during Lent of 2013, and then published as Follow: 40 Days of Preparing the Soul for Easter. The posts from 2013 are all still available at the link above, or in published form in print and Kindle editions.

Downgrading My Patience Rating

I can be a remarkably patient father for about three minutes.

In fact, for a certain time period of my life, I thought of myself as someone who was always patient, and that streak lasted 23 years, until I got married. I have a wonderful wife, so that's not an insult to her, but rather just a statement with which anyone who's ever been married to an actual human being can probably identify. Any self-illusions that we are patient and selfless people get thrown out the window when we marry someone and our selfishness suddenly can't find anywhere to hide.

So after getting married, I downgraded my own patience rating from outstanding to above average. That lasted exactly seven more years, until the day I became a parent. The patience rating took another major hit three years later when the second little one came along. Now, I find myself in the same patience class as Bobby Knight and the Tazmanian Devil.

I'm reminded how much I deserve this low patience rating each time my kids get dressed. It's amazing how close the wrestling match can be between my 6'7" body and that of my 19-month-old daughter when trying to put a shirt on her. And my four-year-old might hold the world, olympic, and Texas state records for longest time getting dressed. I never cease to be amazed by how many other things can catch his attention between getting the first and second arms through their sleeves.

The most humbling part of it is that whenever I watch him in the height of his dilly-dallying and he exceeds that patience limit, I know I'm staring at myself. It isn't just that I see so much of myself in him that I'm sure I was just like that at four years old, but I see so much of my 34-year-old self in the things he does at this age. I get frustrated at his distractions, then fifteen minutes later (by which time he might have his head through the appropriate hole in his shirt), I've probably told my wife, "Okay, I'll be right there," only to get distracted by five or six other things on the way to whatever it is I said I'd do.

Thanks be to God that his patience lasts more than three minutes! In this year-long experiment in prayer, I'm enjoying the luxury of carving out time each day to do nothing but be with God, and when I do so, my distractions affect me so much that I'm well aware how much my attempts at being with God are like my little boy's attempts at trying to get dressed. My attention flies from one thing to the next, but thankfully I've read some good things through the years and am convinced that God is much more patient than I am and those distractions bother me more than they bother God. And I have hope–I'm quite sure that as my son grows, the time required for him to get dressed will decrease, but nonetheless–he does end up with clothes on. So maybe my attention span will increase and I'll get better at this, but even if not, the limited attention that I can give to God as part of this experiment is surely better than none at all.

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Something I've prayed this week:

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Prayer for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is 18th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore, #18

[This post is one of a series of potential Christian plaques that we would never find at a Christian bookstore. See the rest of the list here.]

I think I'll spark a great business idea for someone with this one. It could launch a line of very high-end biblical fashion handbags. Maybe call it the 1233 by Luke series or something like that, so that anyone carrying one of these fine products can always be reminded of how biblical they're being. Make them as expensive as you want––Jesus said they needed to be of the highest quality.