Why it takes ten minutes to roll a burrito

This morning my daughter was tasked with making her lunch to take to school. Normally I help with this, but today I was in a hurry, needing to get ready for an appointment. I put all of the items she would need on the counter and instructed her on what to do: get a tortilla, put in a little of this and a little of that, warm the wrap, roll it and then cut it in half and put it in the container. Easy. Ten minutes later I call down to her and tell her it’s time to get dressed and brush her teeth because we only have a matter of minutes before we need to leave for school, to which she replied, “But I’m not finished rolling the burrito.”

“How long does it take to roll a burrito,” I wondered? Apparently, if it’s my daughter, it takes at least ten minutes. And before you scoff at that, know that there is a perfectly good and logical explanation – she was watching a YouTube video on my iPhone about how to make a rainbow cake while she was constructing the burrito. It all makes perfect sense now.

We, being the multitasking, do-it-all, go-getters that we are, think we can do more than one thing at a time. And yes, we can – but not very well. In fact, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that our brains can only focus on one or two things at a time. Other studies show that multitasking actually causes stress. The more we do (or try to do) simultaneously, the more stressed out we become. The more stressed we are, the harder it is to do what needs to be done, and we start to struggle. The more we struggle, the quicker we deplete our energy and start to sink – drowning imminent.  Not a pretty picture, is it?

It seems counterintuitive but the reality is that when we do less, we accomplish more.  This goes against our conditioning that the more we do, the bigger the payoff. According to Newton’s third law of motion, for every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction. According to Gary Zukav, in his book Seat of the Soul, this means: “you receive from the world what you give to the world.” If you are putting all your frenetic, fractured attention out there, that’s what you get in return: a lot of undone projects, a mess of tangled ideas with no evident outcomes, an unwrapped burrito, and a half-watched YouTube video. Where is the satisfaction in that? It’s much more effective to put your full attention on what needs to be done right here and right now. The rest can wait in line.

For many of us, doing one thing at a time is a major shift in how we operate. It’s a habit that is literally ingrained in our brain. Fortunately, meditation is a practice that trains your brain to focus on one thing at a time. When we practice meditation every day, the landscape of our brain physically changes; the part of the brain that controls attention and focus grows larger. The part that triggers stress and anxiety grows smaller. Meditation calms our nervous system and teaches our attention how to stay in the present moment where our life is happening and where we can make good choices.

This morning I jumped in and saved the day with my mad lunch-packing skills, and we were out the door in the nick of time. Luckily for my daughter, she has her mom to snap her attention into focus when necessary.  Otherwise she’d be nourished only by the lesson she learned from this morning’s multitasking failure: rainbow cakes on YouTube don’t fill up the tummies of fifth graders.

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Quote It Out

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.
~ unknown

Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.
~ Ecclesiastes 4:6

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
~ Rabindranath Tagore