I eat while watching something. I walk to the station scrolling. I scroll in the bathroom, which I am not proud of. Right now there is a video playing in the corner of the screen while I write this.
I do not really do one thing at a time. When I actually checked, I could not find much that I do on its own. Maybe sleep.
It is not that I cannot focus. Give me something genuinely hard, a problem that is a bit stressful and then satisfying when it finally cracks, and I will do only that, for hours, with nothing else running. That kind of thing holds me completely. The trouble is everything below that line. The ordinary, easy, passive stuff cannot hold me on its own, so I put a second thing next to it. Two is easier than one.
It embarrasses the people I work with. I will have a great film going in a little popup corner of the screen while I do something else, and they find that somewhere between absurd and horrifying. A film good enough to deserve the whole screen, running in a box off to the side, half watched. I understand the reaction. I still do it.
I have asked myself why, and it is two things at once, which is fitting. Part of it is that I cannot sit still. Part of it is that I cannot stand dead time. A walk, a meal, a wait, all of it feels like it should be carrying a second thing on its back.
The bike is the honest version of it. When I ride, there is an audiobook in my ears the whole way. I am not just riding. I do not think I have ever really just ridden.
Work is the one place it falls apart. Real focus and a video do not mix, the video pulls the thread loose, so there I do the opposite and juggle several projects at once instead. Meetings were where it actually cost me. I used to keep working through them, listening but not really there. My manager told me. Now I try to keep my hands in the camera so I cannot type, and slowly that has become a habit. I still drift.
None of it feels like a problem, exactly. It feels normal, maybe just how things are now, fast and quick, everything competing for the same minute. If I am honest it is less a bother than a small concern, and the concern is not that I get distracted. It is the opposite. It is that one thing, on its own, is often harder for me than two. I wonder where that line sits, and whether it keeps moving.
The video is still playing in the corner. I have not really been watching it.
