One Thing at a Time... ⏰

☕️ I have this off and on again habit where I start to make a cup of tea and then promptly forget about it. Sometimes it is hours later when I return to the kitchen to discover my folly and have to decide whether to throw it out or salvage it. Every single time this has happened, it was because I got busy or distracted by something else. I’m sure you have your own version of this - doing laundry, cooking, various hobbies…the list goes on.

There are so many studies and articles on the negative outcomes of multitasking, so I won’t belabor it here. Suffice to say, the lesson is to just do one thing at a time.

Just do one thing at a time.

In this modern world, your attention is constantly being pulled away from tasks. This could be for good reasons, but often it is because you have experienced a moment of inactivity or boredom and your knee-jerk response is to fill the space. Most of my missed cups of tea have been due to getting lost on social media. I wasn’t doing anything relevant or of dire importance. I was just momentarily bored. Thirty minutes of TikTok videos later… Other times, there are important reasons for my distraction, but either way the cup of tea is lost in some liminal dimension where it may or may not be consumed.

Try not to feel ashamed if you identify with this tendency. These apps and technologies are explicitly created to pull your attention away from the world around you and to the micro-world of algorithmic curation. They have helped to change your brain to crave constant stimulation and to suffer in the absence of it. Indeed, even the way we work is different from 30 years ago. Slack and Teams messages are flying in constantly, as well as emails, texts, and phone calls. Sometimes forgetting the tea can be unavoidable, like when you are caring for children who need your attention.

How this impacts your health can be immense. Staying in a constant state of stimulation, or seeking it, keeps your nervous system in a constant cycle of fight or flight and collapse. You find yourself wound up by the stimulus, staying engaged with it for sometimes hours, days, or weeks on end. It may even feel productive. Eventually, you’re too tired and you collapse. This could be explicit burnout or it could be consuming mindless content that doesn’t support any intellectual or productive pursuit because your mind is tired. Trust me, I love “brain bleach” content as much as the next person, but too much of it can be very bad for the brain.

The solution here is, again, to just do one thing at a time. So many philosophies and traditions teach this as a means to both happiness and enlightenment. Oh, but if only it were that easy. Your brain has been altered to seek constant stimulation. It will take a ton of willpower, practice, forgiveness, and returning to your intention to change it back. One key point here is that you must become good friends with the feeling of boredom that surrounds inactivity and singular activity.

You must become good friends with the feeling of boredom that surrounds inactivity and singular activity.

Commentary on the world that I constantly hear is that time moves more quickly than it used to when we were younger. While time is a relative concept, much of this perception is your brain moving into autopilot to save energy and assuming information rather than processing new information. How many times have you driven to the grocery store and don’t remember the journey? This is an efficient use of energy, but the downside is that that time you don’t recall is lost and thus time seems to pass more quickly. The same type of feeling of lost time occurs when we interact with too much stimulation. The brain, in its effort to save energy, works at half-capacity and before you know it the tea has gone cold and time is lost.

Limiting stimulation HAS to be a choice you make. The world will not do it for you. But you can create habits and intentions that allow you to stay present with your singular task. I wish I had something more profound to say than restating “just do one thing at a time,” but this is the answer. Simple. Straightforward. And so so hard to do.

🫖 I make tea every day, often two-three times a day. For at least one of these brews, my current practice is to just make tea during that time and to do nothing else. I set the water to boil, measure out my tea in my strainer, wait for the water to boil, pour it over the tea, and wait for it to steep. I don’t check my phone. I don’t tidy up the kitchen. At worst, I’ll have a conversation with my partner, but I stay with the tea. It’s a quiet moment. A pause. A break. A moment for me to just be present. I smell the tea as it steeps. I feel the steam rising from the cup. And it’s the perfect brew every time. Presence, patience, resilience for boredom and inactivity. During this time, I am aware of my emotions, my thoughts, my nervous system state, and my surroundings. It can be boring, but that’s okay. Part of why childhood seemed to last so long is because we were bored most of the time. We had to use our brains to fill time through creativity, wonder, and sometimes just being a bump on a log. Boredom is just space in time.

Here’s a quick bullet-list of ideas to just do one thing:

• Just make the cup of tea

• Only use one mode of tech at a time (put the phone down when you’re watching TV)

• Eat without tech stimulation (no TV or phone)

• Go for a walk without headphones

• Don’t leave ambient sound on (turn off the TV or audio you’re not paying attention to)

• Meditate

Which daily activity do you have that you could stop and be singularly present for? In what ways can you cut out the noise and needless stimulation from the world to be singularly present for the things that matter most to you? Let me know in the comments below.

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* The perspective presented in this post is intentionally general, conveying the importance of singular-focused activity, boredom resilience, and nervous system regulation, while highlighting modern challenges and tendencies toward distraction. While I stand by everything I have written, it does not include nuances around neurodivergences, including attention disorders and other neurological conditions that might limit one’s ability to focus or not focus.