Walking the Dog, Is Not Working Out

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My wife has reminded me on multiple occasions that I am not good at multitasking. So the day I was pressed for time and decided I could kill 2 birds with one stone I should have known I was doomed from the start.

Confucius is quoted as saying “He who chases two rabbits catches neither.” I won’t pretend for a minute that I am smarter than the ancient Chinese philosopher and I sure as heck am not smarter than my wife, but I was still determined to save time.

Time, it’s the one resource that is pretty equally distributed amongst everyone on earth. We all get the same number of minutes in an hour, hours in a day, but it never seems like there is enough time to get everything done.

On this day I put on my Go Ruck backpack, started my Nike Run App, grabbed the leash, hooked up the dog and we were off. It took about 2 minutes before the kind, but kinda condescending voice on my app said — pausing workout — while my dog stopped to sniff the first fire hydrant on our journey.

The next few minutes, there was an unpleasant barrage of the lady saying pausing workout — resuming workout, pausing — resuming, as my dog did what he always did on our walks. You could almost hear the voice from the app losing her patience with me.

I stopped the app. It was in this moment that I realized I was trying to do too much at once.

As we finished the walk, I experienced a calming — be where your feet are — clarity. Ideas started to flow and I realized the value of my time spent walking the dog.

When we got home my wife asked how it went. My response.

“Walking the dog, is not working out.”

We all want to save time, but when we focus on too many things at once, our time loses value. The results usually sound like “I don’t know where my day went” or “Is it really February, what happened to January?”

We tend to remember things of value.

Don’t chase too many rabbits at once, don’t try to kill 2 birds with one stone and remember walking the dog, is not working out.