It was finally my time.
The college media conference in New York City had ended. The awards contest for student journalists I run was in the books. I sat down in my hotel room on my last morning in the city to relax and take it in. I had my phone and a cup of coffee.
Ah, freedom!
I remember this very clearly. I was reading a news feed on my phone. I reached over to put my coffee on the side table. I know it went where it was supposed to be because I heard a tap as it made contact. I didn’t see it. I didn’t need to – I kept my eyes on my phone. But I heard it. And that was good enough.
Then I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. My keen peripheral vision spotted something that rarely happens on land:
A tidal wave.
A giant, brown surging tidal wave!
It was coming from my coffee cup. My coffee cup on the floor.
It was like a coffee cup cannon. It landed on the floor in just such a way that the plastic lid popped off and the coffee erupted into the air. It was a beautiful, arching display. Like an Olympic diver, or a dolphin leaping from the water.
“That’s odd,” I remember thinking. “Coffee cups aren’t supposed to be so majestic.”
And then … I started cursing.
Nice, free, relaxing morning officially over. FIND … TOWELS … NOW!!!
All thanks to trying to do two things at once. Paying too much attention to the one thing, and totally ignoring the other. It was the final straw. I had no one to blame but by myself. My two-timing game was up. It had gone too far. My attention span had been split down the middle one-too-many times, and this was finally the wake-up call.
I wanted to blame so many things. Maybe I should write a letter to the coffee lid manufacturer: “Make your lids hold tighter for the sake of multitaskers!” Or the end table maker: “Who in this day and age doesn’t put safety netting on the side of their furniture?!?”
But I only had myself to blame. And my severe lack of focus.
If New York will teach you anything, it’s that you can’t be absent-minded. You have to pay attention. You must focus and not divide your already dwindling supply of brain power between multiple tasks. You need to laser-focus on the here and now. That’s the lesson learned by countless phone readers who’ve fallen down NYC manholes. Or become hood ornaments on the No. 9 bus to Battery Park.
It hadn’t been the first time for me. On the hotel gym’s treadmill I was watching the TV when I mis-stepped and nearly tripped. If I hadn’t caught myself in time, the speed of the spinning runway would have sent me two blocks over. Or in the airport while trying to fill a water bottle, drink from another bottle and also lower my mask. I poked myself in the eye and nearly drowned while choking. A man ran over and started performing the Heimlich on me.
There were so many, but the coffee explosion topped them all. And was the last straw.
I feel like I used to be good at juggling many things at once. That doing this while also doing that was my “thing.” Was I losing my touch as I get older? Or maybe I never had been any good at it in the first place?
There are no shortage of studies to prove multitasking is the stuff of fools. That when we force our brains to split our attention, they struggle to pull it off. We lose efficiency and make more mistakes. If we studied it, we might find that 95% of the world’s coffee spills are actually caused by people reading about the Kardashians.
And, yet, we keep thinking that dividing up our time and fracturing our focus is going to make us faster, more efficient and somehow more accomplished.
As I was walking back up Seventh Avenue from lunch one day, I was on my phone trying to navigate an issue with one of my contest judges. All around me was history, architecture, commerce, culture, and some dogs dressed in designer sweaters. But I was missing it. I couldn’t pull myself out of my work for 5 minutes to take the time to notice, or even appreciate it. Why are we in such a rush all the time? Why do we have so many things to do? Why can’t we just focus our attention before we fall down the manhole?
As I cleaned up the titanic tidal wave of coffee, I resolved to learn a lesson from it: To let this be a wake-up call to be more attentive, focused and aware. To slow down, not try to do so much and take more notice of the world around me.
I figure it’s better to learn that when it’s only coffee, and not when I’m trying to figure out the fare for a windshield ride on the No. 9 bus to Battery Park.