Meditative reflections: a consciousness assaulted by micro tasks

My life ATM seems to be dominated by microtasks, which I broadly define as tiny little distinct tasks which take a few minutes each to do, as opposed to longer tasks which I can lose myself in.

I've accepted that my main job basically consists of my doing 100s of micro tasks every day....

This is mainly because the nature of writing a blog involves digging for information, much of which is online, which involves several dead-ends and working across multiple windows, and each blog post requires a considerable amount of 'micro-task attention' - images, tags, categories, linking being the main ones, and once written, a blog post requires updating at least every couple of years. Add to this the people I need to interact with, and that's a lot of tasks that take less than a minute each to do.

And dicking about on Hive is certainly worse.

I've worked to combat this over the past couple of years by having a three day weekend in which I do more physical tasks - which tend to be longer form. When I was painting the house a few months back, now there's an activity which definitely isn't 'micro' - much more floweey, however you spell that!

However, with all the moving-out chores I need to do ATM it seems that even my three day weekend (Friday to Sunday) has turned into days of micro tasking... Ebaying and contacting various companies and services are the worst - selling things on Ebay I find quite unpleasant - photo of the item, upload it, add in the details, then all the hassle of posting, or organizing a collection time, and prepping to move abroad has a shed load of chores I need to work through a month in advance - had I not cancelled by BT account three days ago, I would have paid surplus to what I need, so I need to think ahead!

Oh what to do...?

There's not a lot I can do about the nature of what must be done, so I've done two things to soften this assault of the micro-tasks, and to 'heal' the fragmentation of my consciousness.

Firstly, I've structured my weekend day so I have three periods of time totally offline - 1, 2 and 3 hours, in any order, which has kind of worked - that way at least I get three good chunks of no-windows, which is the worst for fragmenting one's consciousness.

Secondly, I've tried to get all of my micro tasks out the way asap in the day, so they're done and dusted, otherwise I find that they 'hang over me'.

Thirdly, I keep reminding myself this transitional period will be quite short term, and soon I can get back to a longer-form life.

I wonder if I'll ever get around to embracing the micro-task. I'm certainly not there yet in terms of my spiritual development - I'm very much in the phase of accepting when I have to do them, limiting the amount of them I have to do, and spending as much time as I can offline and long-forming.

Maybe 10 years of long-form tasks are what I need, then I'll have enough of a sense of calm to go back into the world and embrace the micro-tasks - who knows, I might even enjoy working in a call center by that point - now that's a real sign of enlightenment!

He who masters the head stand also masters time

But he who enjoys working in the call center, he is Buddha.

Another decade or two on the cushion and I'll be there!