Right now, I’m doing really well to tread water. Yeah, you could say that I’m busy at work. Unfortunately, the nature of my job description these days is that I can’t put aside all the interruptions to get done what I need to get done. I feel like a human network router most days lately, and the moniker fits.

That said … I’ve got to take some time soon to unplug from all the distractions and do just one thing at a time for a few hours. It’s somewhat interesting to me that, while I was really tired yesterday and just wanted to come home and go to bed, going to choir was a really wonderful thing for me to do instead—I conjoined fellowship with singing. Best of all, I got into a state of flow with the whole singing bit, and large chunks of what we were doing with the music just flat-out opened up for me.

A lot of my life is spent with tiny chunks of discreteness: emails, feed items, the tiny bits of paper and knowledge I move around the office in my never-ending battle against the Fuck-up Fairy, you name it. It’s like one of those classic kung-fu fight scenes where you see the protagonist take on eight or nine ninjas or something. You know it’s unreasonable to expect that they’ll all take this guy on singly or in pairs, but yet you enjoy the twists, turns, and flips that provide machinations to watch Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, or Chuck Norris to whip everyone’s ass and bag the girl in the end. That’s my life, except I’m single, out-of-shape, and … oh crap, that analogy’s elasticity just went plastic.

I recognize that the multi-tasking is taxing the fool out of my creative energy these days, because it’s really killing my ability to focus. I’m learning to recognize this and to shut down as many non-essential interactions as I can. This was hammered home far harder today when I was lying in the dentist’s chair having an impression made for my crown: the entire design case for the small set of CD shelves I want to make just came together as I laid there, staring at the ceiling. Why did it pop out just then? I wasn’t trying to force my brain to do anything else, and … blammo!

As I’ve been writing this entry, I’ve become conscious of my subconscious back-and-forth here in the office: think while staring at monitor tied to Mac; look at unpowered TV monitor; cycle further left to monitor tied to PC running Azureus to watch the happy numbers spin by; look back to WordPress window. I sigh, realizing that I’ve set myself up for failure here, because I’ve made this whole setup be about doing lots of things at once rather than one or two things really well. No wonder that I don’t feel like I’m getting much done at home these days—I’ve built a crapload of interrupts into my very enviroment!

Hm. I think I’ve gotta rethink my office layout before I multi-task my brain into a pile of jelly. For now, I’m going to go and do one thing at a time … read, or maybe just listen to the radio. Let the brain spin down. Should help me unwind. Lord knows I’ve got the wound-tight thing down to a T.