Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Household

A Simple Way to Kick the Multitasking Habit

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You’ve probably heard about the dangers of multitasking. Apparently trying to do more than one thing at a time is worse for your productivity than staying up all night watching infomercials or smoking marijuana.

In one study, students took 40 percent longer to solve complicated math problems when they had to switch to other tasks. Another study showed that multitasking changes the way we learn and makes us less able to recall memories. If you’re about to click away from this article, because you’ve mastered the art of multitasking, a third study might make you think twice. It turns out heavy multitaskers are worse at doing numerous tasks than light multitaskers.

And the worst part? When we multitask, our bodies release stress hormones and adrenaline. We feel stressed, pressured, angry, and frustrated. One Australian doctor even blames multitasking for “epidemics of rage”.

Maybe you’ve heard that multitasking isn’t as hard for women as it is for men, that our brains are wired differently? Well research has debunked that as well. According to Josh Naish, a science writer at the Daily Mail, “The bulk of scientific investigation into the brain reveals no significant difference between the sexes. The widespread belief that women’s brains are naturally better at multi-tasking seems to be a myth.”

So you’re convinced? From now on, it’s all about focus. Doing one thing at a time. Paying attention.

Me too – except for one thing. I’m a parent, and I work at home. That means that I am doing at least two things every waking moment of every day. I am caretaking, i.e. reminding my three-year-old to look both ways before crossing the street, washing his hands, switching his shoes to the right feet, helping him get dressed (strangely this happens about 30 times a day), feeding him, entertaining him, helping him help me with something, etc… Meanwhile, I’m doing what needs to get done each day to keep our household and my business afloat.

Even when my son is napping or at a friend’s house, and I have some focused work time, I’m on alert, waiting for him to stir or wondering if I will get a phone call from his caretaker. Honestly I have a feeling that if parents took the multitasking research seriously and stopped, disaster would ensue.

So I like to take comfort from this bit of research on the maternal brain. At least in rats, the hormonal fluctuations during pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding reshape the female brain – increasing the size of neurons in some areas and building new structural pathways in others. “Some of these sites are involved in regulating maternal behaviors such as building nests, grooming young and protecting them from predators,” Scientific America reports. “Other affected regions, though, control memory, learning, and responses to fear and stress.” Surely our species is just as well-equipped for parenting, right?

That said, when I started working at home a couple of years ago, I had significant room for improvement in the area of focus. There was always so much to do, and I found myself not just doing one thing (caretaking) while trying to do another (checking my email). I tried to do many, many things at once. Too often I wandered around the house jumping from one task to the next, leaving everything in various stages of incompleteness.

When I recognized that, ahem, I was a multitasker, I imagined exciting solutions to my problem – a fancy smart phone app, some sort of color-coded charting system perhaps – until I stumbled onto the real solution. A simple, humble checklist.

That’s right, I wrote down everything I needed to get done each day. Then I forced myself to focus on one task, finish it, cross it off the list, and go to the next. I know, humans were most likely doing this on cave walls in hieroglyphics thousands of years ago. Here’s why – it works.

Now even when I don’t make a checklist, I take the checklist mentality into my day and force myself to do one thing at a time. Of course, I’m constantly fielding the inevitable distractions of parenting a small child – “I can’t find my bear book.” “Where are my buttons-on-the-legs pants?” “Do we have strawberries?” “I have to go potty.” – but I get loads more done and feel less frustrated.

Maybe you’re thinking that a checklist sounds kind of lame, low-tech … unglamorous. I know. But I’m not the only one singing its praises. Dr. Peter Provonost won the Macarthur Genius Award and was named one of Time Magazine‘s most influential people in 2008, because he found a way to radically decrease infection rates at his hospital, save lives, and cut millions of dollars in unnecessary expenses. His brilliant idea? He required doctors to use a checklist when inserting catheters.

So if you’re feeling harried and unsure of how to find your way out of the multitasking habit, the solution might be easier than you think. Try this: make a list and force yourself to actually use it.

Do you use checklists? Have you discovered other simple hacks for kicking the multitasking habit, or for juggle parenting with working? I’d love to hear about it.

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Happy May Day

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When I was a kid, every May 1, I accompanied a friend’s family in their festivities. We made homemade baskets, filled them with flowers, hung them on neighbors doorknobs, and ran away. Since it wasn’t my family’s tradition, I never understood why or what we were celebrating.

It turns out that May Day was traditionally a pagan holiday practiced throughout Europe in honor of the end of the dormant winter months. Festivities varied from country to country, but dancing around a Maypole with ribbons or streamers has been a common activity in modern times.

May Day is a simple, fun, and earth-friendly way to celebrate the beginning of spring and share some of your blooms, plants, seeds, or handicrafts with your neighbors. Want some inspiration for homemade baskets? Check out these resources:

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Dandelion Season

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It’s spring again … the perfect time to rerun this post from last March…

It’s spring, which means some people are stocking up on Round Up and Weed-B-Gon to prepare themselves for battle against my favorite flower – the humble dandelion. If you’re not as big a fan as I am of these yellow-headed “weeds”, which grow in lawns and sunny open spaces throughout the world, I know of a great way to get rid of them. Eat them.

Every part of the dandelion is edible – leaves, roots, and flowers. And they are nutritional power-houses. They’re rich in beta-carotene, fiber, potassium, iron, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, B vitamins, and protein.

Over the years, dandelions have been used as cures for countless conditions including:

  • kidney stones
  • acne
  • high blood pressure
  • obesity
  • diarrhea
  • high cholesterol
  • anemia
  • cancer
  • diabetes
  • stomach pain
  • hepatitis

“There is probably no existing condition that would not benefit from regularly consuming dandelions,” Joyce A Wardwell writes in The Herbal Home Remedy Book.

She also says that dandelion is “one herb to allow yourself the full range of freedom to explore,” because it has “no known cautionary drug interactions, cumulative toxic effects, or contraindications for use.”

So why not harvest the dandelions in your yard this spring? And I’m sure your neighbors wouldn’t mind if you uprooted some of theirs too. (But you probably want to avoid harvesting near streets or from lawns where herbicides or fertilizers are used.)

The leaves

Dandelion leaves have more beta-carotene than carrots and more iron and calcium than spinach. The best time to harvest them is early spring, before the flowers appear, because that’s when they’re the least bitter.

How can you eat dandelion leaves?

  • Toss them in salads
  • Steam them
  • Saute them with garlic, onions, and olive oil
  • Infuse them with boiling water to make a tea
  • Dry them to use for tea

The flowers

Dandelion flowers are a rich source of the nutrient lecithin. The best time to harvest them is mid-spring, when they’re usually the most abundant. If you cut off the green base, the flowers aren’t bitter.

How can you eat dandelion flowers?

The roots

Dandelion roots are full of vitamins and minerals. They are also in rich in a substance called inulin, which may help diabetics to regulate blood sugar. Dandelion roots are often used to treat liver disorders. They’re also a safe natural diuretic, because they’re rich in potassium. The best time to harvest dandelion roots is early spring and late fall.

How can you eat dandelion roots?

  • Boil them for 20 minutes to make a tea
  • Chop, dry, and roast them to make a tasty coffee substitute.
  • Add them to soup stock or miso
  • Steam them with other vegetables

As most gardeners know, dandelions are virile (some say pernicious) plants. Why not treat them as allies, rather than enemies, this spring?

Interested in reading more about herbs or home remedies? Check out these posts:

Do you eat dandelions? Do you have a favorite dandelion recipe?

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Attention Needed

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“Our attention is pure energy. It transforms whatever it comes into contact with,” writes David Servan Schrieber. “Animals and children know this far better than we do. Over and above food, warmth or money, it’s attention they’re really looking for when they come to us. And they bask in our attention like the sunshine….

“The ultimate proof that our attention is valuable is all the money spent on attracting us by advertisers and TV channels. ‘Look at me!’ they scream. Yet we are never sufficiently conscious of the rich resource we have.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about attention, namely the things that I’m paying attention to and the things that I’m not. In the last few months I’ve had significantly less writing time than usual. Too often when I finally get to sit down in front of my computer, I feel paralyzed. Where to begin? My mind zips through a list of ideas bursting with potential and a bigger list of projects simmering on the back burner.

Sometimes I long for a freelance writing coach to step in and help me navigate the push and pull of this work-at-home life, someone to tell me what to squeak into the diminutive windows of writing time I’m able to eke out at the moment.

Of course, there’s no such person. This is my journey. My path. I must decide which projects deserve my attention. The consequences feel weighty. As Karen Maezen Miller writes, “Whatever you pay attention to thrives; whatever you don’t pay attention to withers and dies.”

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What are you paying attention to right now?

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Learning to Listen Again

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The Christian Science Monitor published my essay “Learning to Listen Again” in their January 31 issue. (It was inspired by a post I wrote here last June.)

My world has gotten a lot louder lately. My 2-year-old son, Ezra, just discovered noise.

“Airplane, airplane, airplane.” He gestures toward the sky until I repeat, “Airplane.”

“Car!” He interrupts the story I’m reading and spins toward the window as a Volvo station wagon rolls by. “Phone, phone, phone,” he says as we walk through the grocery store and hear cellphones chirping.

Usually I’m blocking out these sounds. I suppose it’s a survival mechanism that helps me live in a world full of obnoxious, cacophonous noises, because now that Ezra’s pointing them out to me, I’m longing for silence.

I’m not the only one. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, travels the world recording natural soundscapes, and he’s been spreading some alarming news: Natural silence is going extinct.

“In the last 30 years, I’ve found it nearly impossible in the United States to experience 15 minutes or longer where there’s not some kind of noise disruption in the background,” Mr. Hempton explained in a recent radio interview.

A couple weeks after Ezra starts identifying sounds, my sister announces she’s coming for a visit and wants to go for a hike. “As long as it’s somewhere quiet,” I reply.

We choose McDowell Creek Falls, which is an hour from my house in Eugene, Ore. We turn off I-5 and head down a country road. The farmhouses thin; the road narrows; Douglas firs, Western hemlocks, and moss-covered big leaf maples crowd in. A stream babbles on our right. I can almost taste the silence.

When Hempton talks about natural silence, he’s not talking about the absence of all sound, just of man-made sound. Natural silence can be surprisingly loud, as anyone who’s been to the Oregon coast, visited a rain forest, or heard an elk bugling on a crisp fall morning can attest.

My sister parks the car and I strap my son onto my back. Then we cross a bridge and wind up a hill. My sister stops to snap photos of salmon berries and snails, and I close my eyes. I can hear a waterfall, birds, and an animal scampering through the undergrowth.

“Big truck!” Ezra squeals, as a logging truck rumbles down a nearby road.

Back in Eugene I surf through real estate websites from the tiny Colorado mountain town where I grew up. When I moved to the city for college, I told someone where I was from, and she re­plied, “Oh yes, I go there to listen to the silence.” When I temporarily moved back a few years later, I appreciated what she meant. The evenings were notably quiet in my neighborhood. Most of the houses were dark by 9, few cars passed, and it was more than a mile to the closest highway, which wasn’t exactly teeming with traffic most nights.

I start planning a visit with just one thing on the itinerary: sitting outside in the evenings and staring at the stars – just me and the crickets, hoot owls, and the occasional barking dog. I call my parents to announce we’re coming and to lament that I’m thinking of wearing earplugs from now on.

“I thought you left because it was quiet,” my mom says.

“What are you talking about?” I flash back to the last summer I spent in my hometown before leaving for my freshman year at the University of Denver. I longed to crowd onto the trolley and ride up the Sixteenth Street Mall, weave through packed city sidewalks, and shout along to rock concerts at Red Rocks.

“Remember, you used to complain about how dull it is here, how everyone goes to bed at 9, how…” I interrupt my mom, almost letting it slip that sometimes I go to bed at 9 now. Instead, I change the subject and wander around the house closing windows; outside, a diesel truck is idling and a weed wacker is hacking and whining.

Gordon Hempton teaches wilderness listening at Olympic National Park, and he writes that some students have a difficult time hearing silence for the first time and that many sounds aren’t audible until people have been out on the trail for two or three days. He writes about an elderly woman who took one of his classes. She thought she was losing her hearing and hoping to amplify what little she had left. But in the class, she realized that the problem wasn’t that she’d lost her hearing. What she’d lost was her ability to listen. I think Ezra is teaching me the same thing.

“Leaves,” he says as we walk through our neighborhood. He points up. Far above our heads, the birch leaves are dancing in the breeze, and their gentle rattle drowns out the sound of a passing car. I turn my face up and remember to listen.

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Pruning Season

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We moved into our house a few years ago in mid-February. A couple of weeks later, a neighbor knocked on the door holding clippers, a miniature saw, and a book on caring for roses. “It’s pruning season,” she said, gesturing toward my backyard, which is teeming with rose bushes.

I’d never pruned anything before. I watched as she demonstrated the technique on a few bushes.

“Cut off anything that’s dead or diseased, anything that’s skinnier than a pencil, and anything that’s growing inward,” she said, as she snipped, clipped, and sawed on a bush.

I spent more than a month pruning the roses that spring, examining each plant before making any cuts. Each one felt like a jigsaw puzzle.

Several weeks after her demonstration, my neighbor walked by and saw me hovering over a bush in the front yard. “Don’t worry. You’ll get more confident when you see them grow back this summer.”

I wasn’t so sure. “Where would you cut this one?” I asked tentatively.

Amazingly the roses bloomed that summer. I wandered among them in the evenings, watching the heads close in the fading light,  examining their thorny branches. I already dreaded February’s life-and-death deliberations of which branch would stay and which would shrivel in the yard waste bin.

Then in January, I walked through the city rose garden. The plants, which were gigantic walls of roses in the summer, were pruned down to almost nothing.

A month later, when I returned to the garden with my clipping shears, I had no fear. It took me less than a week to trim all of the bushes, and they were significantly more pruned this time.

Sure enough, by mid-June, my backyard was full of gigantic blooming bushes.

At first pruning felt counter-intuitive to me. I was sure I would hurt or kill the plants by cutting them back so far. But as I return to the garden this year, the process feels more intuitive, and even like an apt metaphor for life.

Sometimes you have to be fearless about cutting out what you don’t need to make space for more things to grow.

[This is an updated version of “Learning to Prune”, originally posted March 2, 2010. It’s pruning season once again, and I’ve found myself thinking of that post. We’ve had some spring-like weather around here, which feels just perfect for pruning – not just the roses, but the house, the closets, the cupboards… It may be a busy week.]

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