The other night I tried to turn on the television with the cordless phone.
Hey – it’s an easy mistake to make. The phone and the remote both have the same panel of numbered buttons – and besides, I had just been talking on the phone, loading the dishwasher and thinking about what I had to do the next day.
Multitasking. You know the drill. Nurses must do this or die.
Who hasn’t tried to chart, answer the phone, tell the doctor you’d be there in just a minute – all while wondering if your 10-year-old remembered his lunch and soccer shoes for after-school practice for which you are the transportation?
I’m told women are better at multitasking than men, who are linear thinkers and aren’t expected to do more than one thing at a time. (Perhaps some male nurses would like to dispute this.) But one of the problems I see is that when the sun goes down, it’s sometimes difficult to turn off my brain.
I have a couple of ways to chill out.
If the small muscles in my eyes are still functioning after all those hours on the computer, I read. If not, I watch a movie (thank you, Netflix) or watch those clever HGTV designers make over their home for $500 or less. And I walk – with a friend – and we talk – about everything and nothing. Better that I pound the pavement with a buddy than do it alone and start mentally constructing that to-do list. That’s no way to relax.
Should we be expected to multi-task and are you adept at doing it? How do you unwind?Help all of us; share your opinions and secrets for holding it all together.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Not a Multitasker? Don't be a Nurse
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1 comments:
I work 12 hr day shifts in a Women's Center, doing Labor and Delivery, as well as postpartum. To unwind after I leave work, I go and feed my horse. That usually starts the unwinding process. Something about the sound of a horse chewing on hay tends to make me slow down. Some days, even though I am so tired and my feet hurt, I brush her. She enjoys it and so do I. Spending time with my animals helps me to put the human stuff into prospective. On 9/11/01, when we all thought the world was ending, I walked into the backyard and sat down to watch my chickens. I had been glued to the TV for hours, watching the attacks over and over again and I was exhausted, but when I watched the chickens, I realized that not that much had changed that morning for me. I know that many people can't say that and that now, a lot of things are different for all of us, but that morning, it was comforting to watch the chickens scratch and look for bugs and worms in the dirt. We humans sometimes really muck things up.
Everyone is different, but that's how I unwind.
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