I was charging down the highway last week to attend a Think Tank session at Bond University – the speaker was Dr Jason Fox.  A cool dude.

As usual, I was cutting it close…on track but aware that if I had difficulty getting a park or got lost, I would be late.  I was lost in thought preparing mentally for a speaking event this week at a Leadership Summit (blatant promotion) but (supposedly) keeping an eye on the nav man.  I saw on the screen that I needed to get off at the next exit – number 82 – and heard the nav ‘man’ tell me that as well.  Excellent, I’d be there in plenty of time.  Then my brain generously handed the reins back to the nav man and I missed the exit. Literally one minute later….attention span of a gnat!

Seriously Michelle!!!!!!…and thank goodness my husband wasn’t with me to give me grief!

The brain can’t multi-task.  It can only switch it’s attention quickly between one or more activities to give the illusion of multi-tasking – just like a computer does.  We can appear to do this well when one of the tasks is a non-conscious one that has been hardwired into our brain – like driving a car along the highway.  We can be elsewhere inside our head and still drive the car.  Our survival brain will detect when there is something out of the ordinary that we need to attend to (like a red light, or a car too close) and bring our attention back, but otherwise, it will conserve energy and leave the non-conscious brain to do its thing.

The more ‘programs’ open (items we are attending to) the slower the performance.

I only had one program open, and I still failed to hold my attention on the critical task at hand – the upcoming exit.

How many programs do you have open?  What ‘exits’ or important information might you be missing?  It’s important, particularly when we are dealing with other humans, to give them the respect of our whole attention in that moment.

Surviving in the modern world requires us to REWIRE how we do things.  This means being aware of the potential loss in intelligent performance when we multi-task.

Have a great week!

Michelle  🙂