Against multitasking

One simple way meditation practice can increase your “productivity”

Many of us work on the internet, or at least flip through apps on our phones for hours every day. This technology affords us unprecedented access to more information, perspectives, and people than we could ever process in a lifetime. To keep up, we multitask, moving from app to app scanning for new information and notifications.

Folks seem to take one of two views on these conditions, opportunity or alarm. Either the internet is a boon for productivity or it shortens attention spans, corrupts children, and works us into zombies.

The productivity crowd often tries to solve problems afforded by technology by prescribing even more, like: “These Products Will Help You Get Shit Done.” This view is biased towards a certain class, entrepreneurs, whose productivity is self-interested. Someone that works for a living may want to be more “productive” when returning emails to friends or running errands, but when they’re at work more productivity mostly just delivers more value to their employer. In other words, increasing productivity isn’t always a good thing — for most of us, it means working harder and harder for decreasing returns.

But Buddhism, particularly meditation practice, offers a path to overcome this dilemma — of having to see all these screens in our lives as either good or bad. It helps make our contemporary condition “workable.”

Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan teacher known for his embrace of “Western” liberalism and individualism, wrote that multitasking produces a “kind of indigestion in the mind.”

“If you are picking fruit from a tree, you may see a particular piece of fruit that looks delicious, ready to eat. You really want to eat that one. But as you are biting into it, you see another fruit on the tree, one that looks even better. So you immediately leap up and grab that piece of fruit as well. In that way you keep stuffing yourself with one fruit after another. You end up eating fruit that is not properly ripened, which finally produced indigestion.”

Meditation practice works what we could call the “muscle” in our mind that wakes us up from discursive thinking, our default setting. I’ve heard discursive thinking described as a kite that’s been let go, darting around violently in the wind. The internet is heavy wind. We read an email and react, but flag it for response later. Then an old friend texts and we respond. We go back to our email, click an interesting link, and read the first paragraph of an article, saving it in a tab for later. Back to the text.

All the thoughts that come up in this state are half thought; they haven’t “properly ripened.” Our body gets tight and our breathe shallow, our energy fades. We keep coasting through apps.

You can return from this trance by feeling into your body. After some time of meditation practice, you learn the most resonant places in your body and how to feel into them on command. It might be the middle of your chest, deep in your stomach, or your feet. It could be the way your lungs feel as your breathe enters them. In meditation we cast these anchors. They become solid points by which we can pull ourselves back into the present moment like a climber up a rock wall. They give us a beat to consciously decide where to put our attention.

If you’ve been coasting for a while, put the phone down, go for a walk.

This post first appeared on futuredebris.com.

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