What's your one important thing?

A discussion with a friend today has inspired today's post.  I was telling her how frustrating the negotiations with the new nursing home are for my father. Clinical nurses trying to wow me with their overwhelming knowledge of 'how things must work' to over come my emotional daughter response. Or something like that.  My friend points out to me that you have to learn which battles are worth fighting for.  

And I've had a 'aha' moment.  Just like that.  

In the past two years in dealing with a range of folk regarding my Dad's healthcare, I've learnt, most often the hard way, that when it comes to negotiating care for someone who cannot speak up for themselves, that the only way to ever 'win' or get a good outcome is to choose just ONE thing.  Making all kinds of seemingly random demands, however well-meaning, serves only to overwhelm staff at every level of healthcare, and to frightening them, and worst of all, to giving them the 'ammunition' they require to then declare you unrealistic and emotional and bring social workers into play to put you in your place (far away from all decision making).

Faced with those daunting prospects, learning to choose just ONE thing to make better, with a fair chance of succeeding and it is remarkable how fast I learnt to ignore some things I found unacceptable in order to continue to fight the good fight about something I found MORE unacceptable.  Eventually however, you can fix quite a few things, as long as you approach it one thing at a time.

I'm sure this isn't a universal guide for all life's adventures, but it certainly provides an interesting point for reflection.  It seems that when we focus all our energies on just one thing we bring a number of patterns into play that actively improve our chances of success compared to a multi-tasking approach.

When you focus on just one thing, everything else fades away
This reminds me a little of the way that gratitude works - when you focus on just being grateful, anger and negativity fade.  Similarly when you focus wholly on choosing a single problem to solve, or action to take, your mind is freed of other cluttering thoughts about other problems, or other choices.  It brings a high level of clarity of thinking to the situation.

One problem is easy to manage
Looking back, I can appreciate how health staff have seen me as an 'emotional family member', even when I didn't see myself that way.  When I tried to discuss 'all the problems' regarding Dad's health and care at once, there were so many, and so many details that it was easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of considerations, and therefore easy to sound stressed and upset.  By contrast, when focusing on just one problem or aspect, it is much easier to sound calm, regardless of how anxious or worried you are on the inside.  

In this same vein, in other life problems, when you see multitudes of problems surrounding you, being overwhelmed can freeze you out of being able to act on any of them.  However focusing on just one problem, or one task is something that is easy to take action on and feel good about quickly.

You get a rewarding sense of accomplishment / finality quite quickly
This is particularly important to me. I'm very much externally motivated, with few internal prompts for action or satisfaction in myself.  I've found that when I focus on single issue items at a time, then I end up with my finality and feedback quite quickly.  Getting a sense of "I did it!" is so rewarding and motivating.  Surprisingly too, realising quickly that something has not worked out or ended the way you hoped is still quite rewarding. It also provides you with a sense of having crossed something off the list, even if the outcome wasn't successful.

Other people have obviously done proper research and noted that:

• Multi-tasking is less efficient, due to the need to switch gears for each new task, and the switch back again.
• Multi-tasking is more complicated, and thus more prone to stress and errors.
• Multi-tasking can be crazy, and in this already chaotic world, we need to reign in the terror and find a little oasis of sanity and calm.
• Our brains can really only handle one thing at a time, and so we get so used to switching between one thing and another with our brains that we program them to have a short attention span. This is why it’s so hard to learn to focus on one thing at a time again. (list sourced from focus: single-tasking and productivity)

My brain is now telling me it is time for sleeping, and being now inept at multitasking, I will end tonight's rambles with a link to the words of someone giving advice about how to give up the multitasking mindset:  Why Single-Tasking Makes You Smarter