So I’m continuing with this new mindfulness (or single-tasking) habit and the results are up and down so far. At times, I feel like it’s the best thing I’ve ever done and can’t understand why I didn’t try it sooner. I feel more present, more aware of what I’m doing and calmer, less anxious. But then at other times I realise I’m putting off doing stuff like my workout and washing up and even cooking and eating actually, because I don’t really want to do them if I don’t have the carrot of being able to listen to an audio or watch a YouTube video at the same time. At those times I wonder if there is even any benefit to banning myself from using these crutches (because let’s face it that’s what they are) to ensure that I get the boring but necessary tasks done.
I’ve also heard the argument that by multitasking in this way you can actually get more done by using the otherwise mindless and unproductive task of washing up or cleaning or walking somewhere to learn something useful. But to be honest I don’t think I buy that. For one thing, I almost always end up listening to or watching junk, or stuff for entertainment purposes rather than education. I might start of discovering a new YT channel or book and learning something from it, but eventually it turns into pure background noise. Because the other thing is that I often tune out altogether so I miss a lot of what they’re saying.
The argument about me possibly not getting stuff done at all if I don’t have a reward for doing it? Well, firstly, I think I just have to grow up and get stuff done if it has to be done. I think too often these days we cave in at the first sign of something being difficult, and we have so many excuses and ways to do this now. We already have machines that accomplish almost all of the heavy lifting for us. But then we have all these books and gurus telling us life is supposed to be fun and easy and absolving us of any responsibility for doing anything we don’t want it seems. So I think there’s an argument for just knuckling down and doing stuff. But secondly I think the benefits of giving your whole mind to one thing at a time are worth going through a bit of struggle to begin with. At least I hope that these benefits are going to be worth the trouble!
Finally, I suppose the biggest argument in favour of me continuing with this experiment is that my life is not exactly going brilliantly as it stands. Years of using audios and videos to encourage myself to do what has to be done hasn’t really gotten me fantastic results. I don’t have a gym bunny body. I don’t have a very clean house (at all). I don’t garden regularly. I am almost always tragically behind on the washing up. So this strategy of pairing a boring task with a fun one clearly hasn’t really worked for me.
So even though life does feel a bit hard right now, and I honestly don’t really think I’m going to manage to force myself to do my workout this afternoon, I’m going to try to keep this going for a little while longer.
I’m also contemplating today whether my tiredness, grumpiness, and lack of motivation in the afternoons is really to do with actual physical tiredness, i.e. running out of steam, leaving the less interesting and even unpleasant tasks to the afternoons, or in fact that by the afternoon my inner monologue has had a chance to make me negative, full of self-doubt, guilty, panicked and all the other good stuff that robs me of almost all my willpower to do anything except laze around watching TV.
With that said, I’m off to laze around for a bit and listen to a Michael A Singer audio, while doing nothing else, purely focusing on the audio, so it is allowed, in the hope that he has some helpful tips on how to shut this inner monologue up once and for all, or at the very least learn to let what it says drift on by and leave me to enjoy my life in peace.