Many of us are annoyed by the ideal moms from Instagram (an extremist organization banned in Russia), and this is not surprising: when to take care of yourself if the family requires constant attention, plus work, plus caring for parents? I would have time to meet with a girlfriend once a month, not like going to a manicure. How to learn to do everything?
Five years ago, multitasking was considered an extremely useful ability. To this day, some employers write in job descriptions: the candidate must be able to simultaneously deal with different tasks and manage to do everything at once.
However, research shows that multitasking is mentally detrimental and, what employers need to know, reduces the efficiency of good people. Why?
The pernicious ability to switch
It is known that when many tabs and windows are open on a computer, in one of which there is a movie, in the other music is playing, and the third is loading the game, this negatively affects its work. If the computer starts to freeze, it is recommended to close all unnecessary programs so as not to overload the RAM.
Switching from one task to another and keeping a mass of current affairs in memory requires huge energy costs, and this applies not only to technology. We, people, in the same way, spend a lot of energy on quickly switching from one thing to another, keeping all processes in mind, responding to everything at once. All this energy could be directed to the affairs themselves.
Because of this fuss and tension, productivity suffers, because our resource is not infinite. The more effort is spent on maintaining “readiness for anything”, the less is spent on the implementation of specific tasks.
How to stop multitasking and free up time and energy?
1. Write out cases
«Get it all out of your head!» — sounds tempting, doesn’t it? On vacation, this is possible, but if you have two jobs, three children and five dogs, it is better not to throw it out, but to write it out.
In the morning, set aside 10 minutes and write down in a notebook everything that needs to be done in the near future in general and for the day in particular. Of course, it’s impossible to do everything, which means that the entries will move from one page to another, but this way you will stop wasting energy on keeping all the things in memory. Believe me, this in itself is already a huge energy saving.
2. Plan
What is carefully planned is much more likely to materialize. For example, many of us do not like to visit the tax office or the EIRC, and this task can be put off for years. The stress from not fulfilling it accumulates, puts pressure on us and takes away strength.
To close a pending task, plan carefully: write down what you need, how long it might take, and then imagine how you complete it. You can even schedule something nice after — a reward in the form of coffee with friends or a walk in the park. The more carefully a business is planned, the faster and more productively it is implemented.
If you feel tired, recovery procedures are not a luxury for you, but a necessity.
3. Do one thing at a time
Decided to dedicate the next two hours to a child? You will have to voluntarily abandon the rest of the cases. Turn off your TV, tablet, computer, and, if possible, your phone too. Then the time spent with the child will be truly high-quality and interesting. Children are very sensitive to the quality of attention we give them. If the mother cooks in parallel with the game and looks into the mail with one eye, the child feels a lack of attention, which means that she will demand more and more.
Sometimes an hour of quality time together is enough for the baby to enjoy and «get enough» of mom’s attention, instead of a whole day of «half-mom», half-immersed in work.
4. Rejuvenate
In order for communication with the family and work to be exclusively a pleasure, there must be enough strength for this. A person with a deficiency of vital energy wants one thing: to be left behind and allowed to recover. Therefore, if you regularly feel tired, restorative procedures and pleasures are not a luxury for you, but a necessity. Many women fall into a vicious circle: “I give all my time to my family, I get so tired, but everything is not enough for them — I can’t spend time on myself, otherwise they will be completely upset.” But if you do not take care of yourself, then there will be less and less strength, and the «hunger» from the lack of mother’s love will only increase.
In the past, a woman who worked in the field, and then looked after her family and home, laying out food, took the largest piece for herself: if she did not have the strength, the whole family would suffer. In modern families, time has become the most scarce factor, and we need a “big piece” of time for ourselves in order to restore the resource.
Take care of yourself — and your quality of life, and therefore the quality of life of your entire family, will only grow
Be sure to make time for:
- body care — a trip to a massage or to an osteopath, to the pool or spa. Learn body practices for relaxation. With a hectic pace of life, special bodywork techniques, such as Sing Shen Juang Chi Kung for the spine, are needed to learn how to relax after a busy day.
- meditation — practice will allow you to find inner silence and learn to prioritize confidently and calmly. Thanks to the skills of meditation, the planning and volitional decisions described above for organizing your life become a natural, measured, enjoyable process.
- Energy practices — breathing exercises, such as female Taoist practices, allowing you to recharge your batteries and increase your energy potential. This is an additional source of energy, which is so necessary in modern life.
Take care of yourself — and your quality of life, and therefore the quality of life of your entire family, will only grow.