Working from home, supporting distance-learning children, checking in on friends and family who need some extra support, and just making time to sweep up those unsightly dustballs just under the front of the sofa...our COVID-19 moment has driven our multitasking to frenzied heights.

We've all been warned, haven't we? The human brain was primordially wired to do one thing at a time. When we try to push beyond that, we suffer. The work is not our best. Worse, we put our health at risk.

Dr. Teri has a term for it: running on minimum.

"Constantly being on an almost-empty tank," to hear her define it. "Not having a full tank to be comfortable, to be able to go deep on something, to be able to get traction. We're jumping from Zoom room to Zoom room, texting...."

Not that she's immune to it. "My calendar invites, with the Zooms and the Skypes, and the this and the that...it's kind of crazy." [3:20]

But running on minimum encompasses more than mere multitasking. It's a mindset that seduces us into believing that we can accomplish more by touching lightly on one task or topic and then pivoting quickly to the next. That by doing so, we can actually preserve our energy, as if each job we're called to tackle is merely one frame in a feature-length movie, one stride in a marathon.

"You're constantly in an exhale mode," says Dr. Teri. "That's not sustainable. I believe that being in that state can cause you to fall ill, physically."

The path to true productivity and sustainable health? Lose the shallow-and-broad mindset, and replace it with focused-and-deep.

This holds whether the work at hand is creating a PowerPoint presentation for the board, sewing face masks for essential workers, or helping your daughter prove the Exterior Angle Theorem.

What awaits you along your focused-and-deep journey? The Flow State.

Listen to Episode 7: The Hazards of Running on Minimum, then tell us about your personal Flow State.

Listen now on:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Google Podcasts

[Graphic credit: "The little blue wheel keeps following me," by Axel. Used under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)]

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/ParadiseReclaimed?fan_landing=true)