Multitasking might not be a good thing

Extreme efficiency creates a ruthless way of moving through the world devoid of joy, connection and spaciousness

When I entered medical school, I had the same naive and universal goal as young future physicians in short white coats everywhere. I wanted to connect with patients and help them make meaningful changes in their lives. I wanted to sit with them, ushering them through their most challenging moments.

Then came residency: gruelling 30-hour call shifts, 80hour workweeks, and inpatient hospital rotations carrying three pagers and two dozen patients. As a family doctor in training, I was doing what I always wanted: bearing witness to the most meaningful moments in my patients’ lives. That included births and deaths, serious diagnoses, illnesses and recoveries. But there were limited hours in the day and limitless tasks on my to-do list. So I focused on being efficient, the metric that every resident is secretly graded on more than diagnostic acumen or bedside manner.

It turned out that I was good at being efficient. I’m a New Yorker. I talk fast and I walk fast. My brain likes working in parallel on multiple tasks at once, and I figured out how to page a consult, check a potassium level and scarf down graham crackers that I had stolen from the nurses’ station all at once. Then, at the end of residency, I had a baby, and I was back at work after five weeks. The multitasking skills I had acquired were invaluable as I slogged through those early months as a working parent.

As time went on and residency turned into a grown-up doctor job and one baby turned into two, I became addicted to the mental high-fives that I gave myself as an efficient working parent. I could simultaneously pack snacks, check the hours for the children’s museum and shove mouthfuls of oatmeal into my toddler’s mouth.

One day last spring, our friends visited us in San Francisco from New York with their twin toddlers.

Need for patience

That night we went to see one of my favourite local Bay Area musicians, Scott Gagner, play a show at a cosy, velourclad bar in the Mission. Gagner is one of the finest purveyors of the “Dad Love Song” genre, and that night he played Hummingbird Heart, one of my favourites, about trying to get his young son to wind down at the end of the day. But the mantra of the song, “And I try to slow down your hummingbird heart,” intended for his son, resonated as a call to action for myself.

Patience was what was missing in my life. It turns out that the seedy underbelly to extreme efficiency is that it creates a ruthless way of moving through the world that can feel devoid of joy, connection and spaciousness.

I tried to make a change at home, internalising the idea of shifting speeds when I walked in the door. When my toddler wanted to linger an extra few minutes to try to put on his own pants rather than letting me help him, I tried to take deep breaths and be patient while he fumbled.

My time with my kids started feeling more rewarding, so I thought I’d try to take some of the patience that I had been so desperately cultivating at home, and bring it back to work. I started asking patients more about their families, their hobbies and their passions, to find out what was important to them.

And on a good day, if I breathe right, I can try to slow down my own hummingbird heart.

■ Alison Block is a family doctor, mother of two and writer living in the San Francisco Bay area.