No – I haven’t got it wrong – that’s what it is.

For a while I thought I was onto something with so called ‘multi-tasking’, watching a movie while clearing emails, or sending invoices only to discover that I couldn’t follow the storyline or even remember the movie when it was over. I gave up on a number of movies because they didn’t make sense, but in hindsight I wasn’t actually paying attention.

‘Semi-tasking’ crept into my life fairly innocuously – it seemed silly to watch TV and not do something ‘productive’ at the same time, but as time went on I realised I was losing my grip on either or both of the things I was doing. Then it went from doing something productive, to just doing something else, so I’d surf Facebook or Instagram, or eBay while ‘watching’ a movie.

I discovered it became a habit to surf and watch, but a dissatisfying habit and I’d guess even a destructive one.

Maybe its just me, but I get the sense we can either do one thing well or multiple things at a fraction of our capacity. I’ve decided to return to old fashioned mono-tasking and see how that goes.

I’m doing some personal reflection on the place of screens in my own life and this is the first shift. One thing at a time… seems so ‘last century’… but I think I’d like to go back there.