‘Awfulizing’, multitasking, and burning the toast

So this was my day today. Achievements included:

Burning my toast

Filling the house with burnt toast smoke

Realising the smoke alarm isn’t working

Frantically trying to retrieve said burnt toast from the grill and burning my fingers

This, my dear friends, is what happens when you try to multitask. I can guarantee you that things will go wrong from thereon out.

So why did I decide to start multitasking today?

Actually, I never decided to multitask. Before the multitasking came a bout of ‘awfulizing’ which is something that I tend to be pretty adept at, having anxiety and depression that I’m just starting to learn to manage without the aid of medication.

What happens is, something fairly innocuous happens and my brain somehow interprets it as a threat to my very survival, kicking off a spiral of frantic, anxiety-driven behaviour, because I have convinced myself that the worst is very much about to happen.

In this case, one of my clients requested a meeting. I’ve really been juggling quite a lot lately, so my immediate thoughts on this were:

Why do they want to have a meeting? They haven’t said why they want a meeting. That must be bad.

They’re not happy with my work. OMG, they want to dispute my last invoice. OMG, I’m not going to get paid.

OMG, maybe they want to fire me.

OMG. I am dooooooomed.

This is what’s known as ‘awfulizing’. This is a common situation when you have anxiety. I’m usually quite good at containing it these days, but today, I was tired (slept half the night on the sofa after falling asleep watching Masterchef on iPlayer — hey, I’m a food writer, it has to be done). Tiredness always means less control over anxiety. Fact.

My response to the awfulized thoughts in my head?

Must. Work. Hard.

Must. Prove. Not. Useless.

Must. Do. Lots. Of. Stuff.

Because we all know that “doing a lot of stuff” aka multitasking, means you’re being productive and useful, right?

Wrong.

I read this article by Larry Kim the other day about multitasking, and all the science-y stuff about how it fries your brain cells and reduces your IQ to the level of a child totally makes sense, but you don’t really begin to realise just how utterly counterproductive and shitty multitasking is until you reap the consequences for yourself. It’s a bit like how my parents warned me not to put my finger near the hot pie that had just come out of the oven but I really, really needed to find out for myself why, y’know?

Yeah, I have a bit of a predilection for getting my fingers burnt.

Multitasking is a bit like panic buying in supermarkets, like everyone did when we thought the world’s computers might simultaneously crash as the date ticked over to 01/01/2000. People bought shit they were never, ever going to eat, because they went into panic mode and just went, if it’s canned and has a shelf life of at least 30 years, I need it. Cue trolleys full of Spam, tinned pineapple and dried beans that only the weevils will ever eat. This is kind of how my day went. I went into a mad panic and ended up producing a lot of stuff, but I also ended up snappy, tearful and craving chocolate because I’d burnt my breakfast.

In an attempt to try and show the world just how much of a productivity ninja I was, I had in fact successfully managed to demonstrate that I was, in fact, totally unhinged. Because that’s what happens when you try to do a gazillion things at once — your brain just isn’t built for it. Sorry, human, you can only do one thing at once. Deal with it.

Multitasking will only increase your stress, decrease your productivity, prompt piss poor decision making and make you feel as exhausted as if you’d just run the London Marathon, but without having actually gone anywhere.

In short, all you will end up with is burnt toast and no breakfast.