Multitasking and Attention Residue

I have had a very mellow Sunday filled with writing and reading (and a little snow shoveling). I feel as though I had a very productive writing day today. I have about 500 words to add to an article that I am working on, a last literature based article before turning my attention to more pedagogical and curricular topics for the remainder of the year. It's my intention to send it to the journal for consideration next Sunday and that seems very doable at this point. This makes me feel really good because I had been multitasking many articles and manuscripts over the past few months and there is definitely a nice feeling to be able to work through articles one at a time without the perpetual “attention residue” to borrow a term from Cal Newport’s Deep Work. Attention residue is when the last thing that you were working on is still very much on your mind as you try to work on a new thing and therefore your full attention or presence is not on the task at hand. The attention residue from my various writing “to dos” was starting to take its toll and it is nice to be almost free.

This attention residue also creeps up when reading books. Because of the holidays a lot of the books that I put on hold at the public library did not arrive until I was back at work. This is fine, but it also meant that I had about 4 or 5 books arrive at the same time. There has to be a German word for this phenomena (bibliothekbestandegleichzeitig?). Anyway I really dislike it. I dislike it because I want to be cognizant of folk who would like the books after me and so I want to get them back in a reasonable time frame, I also dislike it because I want to place my attention on one great thing at a time when it comes to the books I am reading. Enter a snow storm Saturday which meant I made a great dent in the pile of books and I am really really enjoying The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger, which is the second last one I have to read.

There are usually two schools of thought when it comes to working on written academic work: one is the finish one paper first before going onto the next, and the other is move each paper forward meaning you do a little bit of writing on each paper each time you write. I could never do the move each paper forward for any sustained period of time, but I know it works well for many of you. Similarly, I could never really read many books at once, I would much rather finish one first before going on to the next. I am very good at multitasking in my daily administrative work, or in teaching, but when it comes to writing and reading I find one at a time works best for me.

It is also nice to start the year without having too many competing thoughts in your mind. The momentum should ramp up or accelerate as the semester goes on, not necessarily start at the ski jump portion. I am curious of what others feel about multitasking when it comes to writing and reading books. Feel free to share your ideas on Twitter or here on the blog. Now I am going back to the great novel I am reading happy in the fact that I had a good half day or so of writing and editing.