Why is less multitasking more?

"The closest I get to multitasking is ignoring more than one thing at a time."

Women are inclined to care about everyone, every detail of the many tasks they have, they would like to see that all is in order and believe they are good at multitasking. We are even proud to possess this skill and we say it is a must.

Would you be hired for a job if you were not good at multitasking? How would you handle all the juggling tasks in life without needing to do things at the same time?  

We are convinced we can get more done and are more productive by multitasking.

Taking phone calls when driving and writing notes at the same time. My common evening practice is cooking, helping or controlling homework, making a shopping list and sometimes reading an article all in a short period of time. Multitasking at work can be as bad with more pressure to achieve more.

Looking for balance is fun. Spending time thinking about how we can improve our unbalanced aspects of life.  

Recent research has shown that there is a misperception of multitasking and it often has a cost of reducing productivity.

If we often switch from one task to another it is difficult to tune out distractions, we lose focus and  our brain slows down our progress.  

According to some studies those who frequently do many things at the same time, the so-called "heavy multitaskers” think they are probably good at this activity. The process is however, that first we decide to do something else instead of another and then because of the change we need to alter the rules of doing the previous task to different rules of the new task. If we then keep on switching back and forth, the process slows down, our productivity decreases. 

So maybe it is worth slowing down and checking in our daily schedule how many times are we multitasking, and how ”heavy multitaskers” we are. Are we really achieving our goals and do we need to do all those tasks at the same time? How can we do things in a different way and maybe not do some of it at all?  Maybe it is simply better for our well being and our poductivity to focus on one task at a time. Less is more.

Read more on the topic of multitasking:

www.about.com  
www.psychCentral.com
www.inc.com  
www.newageeconomy.com

Inspiration to slow life

Simple, natural and authentic. These were the first impressions our host  Alberta Cavazza  gave  as she met  our group smiling,  when we got off  the motorboat that stopped in the tiny harbour on Isola di Garda, a little Island on the Garda Lake in Italy.   

We went to visit  the heritage of the Cavazza  family,  taking a break  off our cycling  tour  on the shore.  It turned out, that our guide was  one  of the  Cavazza  children ( four brothers  and 3 sisters ), a successor of the family  who have always  lived   and worked  on Lake Garda.  Now they  are managing a group of companies  active  in agroturismo, boating,  campsite and olive –growing.  The  seven children  have decided to work on restoring the many centuries  old Venetian  neo-Gothic style villa and old park, which  has a unique composition of  vegetation  „a harmonious wood of pines and cypresses, acacias and lemon trees, magnolias and agaves”.   Alberta  grew up in one  part of the Villa, where the whole family  lived  from the end of the 1960s.  

Today three of the  seven siblings  live on the island with their children having divided the Villa in three parts which they take the responsibility  to restore.  Alberta ’s part is the  beautiful  tower  which we learned as she  told us  their story.They have  opened up the Island to guided tours  and events to  be able to carry out  ongoing important restoration work, so slowly they can improve  the state of the villa and the old park.

Their children and cousins go to school on the shore of the lake  by boat.  „ When I was a child the motorboat didn’t have a cover ,  so we  were frequently  drying  our  books  and  ourselves   at the radiator”, she said. 

Getting home from school,  each child  takes care of their own plants and fruit trees, vegetables on the Island.  They  play in the wild nature and a little playhouse that was built roughly 2 centuries ago for a little girl ancestor of theirs who had no sisters or brothers.  

Alberta  is  very busy with everything, but she is in no rush.  She organises these guided tours 3-4  times a week, she just finished a book  about the Island, she manages  her family  with 2 children, she runs several   businesses  and activities.  As she moves, talkes , smiles  in this  environment, she  lookes as if she was living in complete harmony with the slowness , silence and the beauty of this Island and breathtaking architecture.

Are  you  looking  for  your  harmony and slowness in life ?

Slow 2 balance introduction

This is a slow blog about balancing our lives. Exploring how to enjoy a slower pace, developing  through  sharing experience, thoughts, services, products  with one another to  live a more meaningful life connected to  ourselves, people around us and the place we live in.
Slow because I am experimenting this topic, there is no pressure to  always have something meaningful to  say on a blog and  I am  not a writer.  Most of all  I am happy to connect with  people who would like to share their views on this topic. I am Hungarian, living  in Basel with my family. 


Are you also trying to balance your life among family, work, parenting, friends, sports, being yourself, self development, getting a sense of achievement and all other loads of things?
A continuous balance probably does not exist, but if we slow down, think, change sometimes,  reflect on ourselves, from time to time a sense of satisfaction and balance will come.

My solution was  before,  to put absolutely everything on schedule, sleep less, do more....  until my health condition started giving up.

We then moved to  Switzerland from Budapest, a "metropol of  happening and pressure".  I guess those who have relocated to Switzerland from a fast world,  know all what I could be saying here :).


Nevertheless, being surrounded by a slow environment,  observing different ways of  living, what I call now slow living,  I had to acknowledge, that by slowing down I have probably won five  - ten additional years to my life expectancy,  I slowly became healthier  and that the biggest advantage  is an obvious and huge change in the  quality of our lives, regardless of  any quantitative change. Just  a slower lifestyle.  Of course specifics of  Switzerland as well like the  amazing clean air, good geographical location to travel, advantages of small scale towns, perfect public transportation, good schooling, healthy local food supply, more time for building personal relationships and so on.


If slowing down has advantages, why not elaborate the details? I started redefining how I would like to live my life from then on, which still included family, home, friends,  work and so on, but none of these with the same routine, but with a  more appreciating, more satisfied, more open, simply a more balanced life.
Sometimes slow, sometimes fast and sometimes allowing myself not to do specific things at all.

Does this sound easy?  Yes, it sounds easy, but it is much more difficult to do!  I believe many of us after relocation, in a transition period or in a period of  any kind of change wish  we could know the way. There is no fast answer! 

I got a final inspiration to start this  blog while visiting Isola di Garda and the Villa Borghese at the Lake Garda in Italy this spring, where I found a very inspiring example of  living a "slow" and balanced life. We are surrounded by "slow" lives, but do we notice the advantage?


Why the title  “slow 2 balance” ? 
We  tend to think, by doing everything fast we will get where we want quicker. But do we get there quicker? Or do we get there at all?
By slowing down occasionally and connecting to ourselves and things that are really important to us we might be able to make better decisions about our lives. A slow life is not necessarily being slow all the time, it is about deepening experience with everything around us, which occasionally means we need to slow down to think whether we are doing the right things at the right speed.


Do you have slow experience occasionally?
I would love to hear your opinion.