Part of enduring a seven (or so) year midlife crisis has included spending a wasteful amount of time trying to work out the perfect schedule. Like so many middle-class scramblers—mothers looking for side gigs and other ways to earn money—I have longed for it to be true that the perfect work life is only a matter of assembling the perfect number of life hacks. The problem isn’t that I’m a sinner living in a social media-saturated technological dystopia, it’s that I just haven’t downloaded the right app to track my working hours. The only thing standing between me and happiness is greater efficiency or a world without email.
Let me just interrupt myself. Cal Newport talks about how the human mind is not meant to switch between tasks all the wretched time. Your soul (he doesn’t use that word, but I am) wants to complete the task in front of it before moving on to something else. One problem with carrying your phone around in your pocket is that your mind is constantly being asked to switch from one thing to another, hundreds of times a day. You’re thinking about something, but then your phone dings, so then you look at your phone, and then you have to work hard to get back to the thing you were thinking about, and then your phone dings again. This is manifestly true. But what is unbearably irritating is that as I am typing this—as I am trying to work out my thoughts about being interrupted and the horrible futility of work in the post-post-post-modern era—grammarly is interrupting me to suggest that the words I’m typing here are not really the ones I mean to put down. In fact, I have just typed g.r.a.m.m.a.r.l.y and the intrusive app has underlined it in red because I didn’t use a capital letter. And you know what, I’m not going to fix it. I’m just going to let it sit there—that big red mark—and gnaw away at my mind.
In the name of efficiency and better communication, in other words, the “helps” that are provided intrude into my mental space and drag me out of the groove of my own thoughts. All. The. Live. Long. Day.
Anyway, back to my original thought.
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