Multi-tasking

“God will never give you anything you can’t handle.”

-Kelly Clarkson

It’s pretty easy to do one thing at a time. Two things? No problem. Three or four, even? Sure! It’s not hard to multi-task; you do one or two things here and there and, a little at a time, everything gets done. But, sometimes, we try to do everything all at once; that’s when we experience problems.

Sometimes, when faced with a series of tasks, it seems like a really good idea, at first, to do everything all at once. That way you won’t have anything to do later, right? That is, until you realize that, while you’ve been so busy doing tiny pieces of everything, you have actually ended up doing nothing. This is a big problem in high school, too. Most of my classmates are very smart, responsible kids; but it seems that when we’re all busy getting everything done early and trying to make it all perfect, there’s almost always something that we end up not being able to do. It causes unnecessary amounts of stress to juggle as many things as possible, simultaneously making them all perfect. It’s difficult to focus on the important things; I have missed a lot of things because I’ve been either too busy or too exhausted to do anything. Sometimes, the stress of multi-tasking makes me wish I hadn’t participated in anything outside of classwork.

When I find that I’m stretching myself thin, it’s much easier to take a step back, think of the most urgent, most important tasks first, and accomplish them bit by bit. Sometimes I even write down everything I have to do in order to accomplish a big task. I break things up and re-organize, and then I take a break. No, I don’t mean that you should procrastinate; if you take a little breather, say five minutes or so of yoga or YouTube, or having a snack, it relieves a tremendous amount of stress and clears your mind. It allows a little more room in your mind to think about the task at hand.

So, next time you find yourself stretched thinner than tracing paper, just re-evaluate, have a breather, and then put your nose to the grindstone; just make sure you only have your nose on one grindstone at a time.

Kimberly Nelson is a senior at Odessa High School. She has been working at The Record after school on Wednesdays to upload our content onto our website.