Do you remember your last job interview? Do you remember them asking you that stereotypical job interview question: "What's your greatest weakness?" You know the question--some people refuse to answer it, others turn it into a parody: "My greatest weakness is that I work too hard." My answer to that question has always been the same: "I am a naturally disorganized person." I'm very disorganized. I forget my best ideas moments after I've thought of them. I'm terrible at time management. I can't multitask. If I'm driving a car and a passenger is talking to me I will invariably end up in the wrong place; I can talk, I can avoid hitting people, I can get where I'm going, I can sometimes do two of those things, but I can never do all three. So if you want to have a conversation with me, you'd better hope we don't get where we're going.
The reason I've always answered this way at interviews is not because it's my greatest weakness (I've got much worse than that). No, it's because I've found ways to cope with it. I still can't really multitask, but I've developed a system I call "serial multitasking": Focus on one task for a brief period of time, then another, and another, eventually coming back to the first. I've found ways to focus by going for walks and listening to music. I practice the discipline of writing because it helps my mind to get unstuck when it's skipping. In short, I've created habits that help me live the life and do the things I truly want to do.
The bible is littered with this idea. It doesn't talk about freedom as the opposite of slavery, but as being a slave to something better. When God led His people out of Egypt, He didn't tell them they were free to do whatever they wanted; He gave His people a set of rules and expected them to follow. It was as if He claimed ownership of them. He pulled them out of Slavery in Egypt in order to make them slaves to Him. Thousands of years later, an early Christian demanded his fellow believers become "slaves to righteousness." This is what I'm trying to do.
All this is to say that lately, many of my habits have revolved around my Blackberry. So when it crashed a few weeks ago I went into a productivity tailspin. It wasn't until I got things put back together this morning that I started to come out of it. And all that is to say: sorry, I'm back.
Sent from my BlackBerry® device from Digicel
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