Healthy Monday: Multi-Tasking is for Superwoman

Cute, cute, cute! Rosy Print Designs, "Super Hero Girl."

My hubby and I were watching something on our computer t.v. recently (our television is hooked up to a computer and we watch stuff on Hulu) and at the same time I was tapping away on my laptop, hoping to get some work done. I responded to something that happened on the television and my husband looked at me incredulously and said, "You can actually follow what's going on while working?" I gleefully replied that I could, as I was a woman and that made me a superb multi-tasker, a fact proven in a recent study. However, the next day I was holding my baby, trying to put on makeup, get dressed, and print something out on my computer, and I ended up walking out of the house forgetting to put deodorant on (a nightmare in my sweaty world!) and a whole slew of things missing from my daughter's diaper bag. So while multi-tasking is sometimes a necessity, I am pretty sure that it causes us to perform with our cognitive flag at half staff. And there is the science to prove it. A team at Stanford University found that heavy multi-taskers consistently managed to forget certain tasks and were more easily distracted by irrelevant stimuli.

Perhaps I am writing this out of my own self need, but as a working mom and a devoted wife, I sometimes find that trying to do it all leaves me feeling anything but accomplished. Rather, I am left exhausted, stressed, and as explained above, often forgetting those everyday necessities. So I hope this Healthy Monday post leaves you with two simple reminders: one is that it's okay to put some things on the back burner. Two, if you absolutely must multi-task, always have a backup stick (or container) of deodorant in your purse.