Geoff O'Keeffe

This Stillness

19 April, 2018 by Geoff O'Keeffe Leave a Comment

This Stillness -For Paul He said that stillness answers every question. Alone and still I let go and the question softens and settles. Together as two or ten or twenty we let the answer go and the room empties. The trash truck agrees from the street asking and answering in one crisp crash. NO! -Geoff … [read more]

Hamburger Creed

16 April, 2018 by Geoff O'Keeffe 4 Comments

I’m no gourmet. I grew up on fish sticks for Friday dinners, waffles, pan-fried chicken, creamed peas and potpies. I understand a little about good cuisine, but like with wine, where I am very clear what I prefer but know little about it, I am hopeless when it comes to having the encyclopedic knowledge of … [read more]

Dolor

9 April, 2018 by Geoff O'Keeffe 1 Comment

(Editor’s note: Barbara Jackson is a Northwest poet and healer, deeply intuitive practitioner of natural plant arts and a friend of O’Keeffe Woodworks. We have published her poems over the years. Barbara’s work with those going through major life changes gives her crystalline insights into our condition.) DOLOR He was still there the … [read more]

L.A. and Ellroy

1 April, 2018 by Geoff O'Keeffe 3 Comments

I love LA. Not many admit to such a thing. It is orthodoxy to hate Los Angeles north of the 405 and east of the 101. I saw Joni Mitchell at Dorothy Chandler in March of 1974, with Tom Scott, Max Guerin, Robben Ford and Max Bennett. Joni confessed her love of LA and from … [read more]

Doing Just This One Thing

27 March, 2018 by Geoff O'Keeffe 4 Comments

I don’t think anyone twisted my arm in the business environment and forced me to adopt the misguided notion of “multi-tasking”, which first showed up on the business landscape in 1965, referring to the capabilities of an IBM System/365 computer. Someone thought it wise that we emulate machines. We can’t count on the corporate world … [read more]

TSWB by Bob Woodward

5 March, 2018 by Geoff O'Keeffe 1 Comment

Woody at Sierra Designs’ second location, Fourth and Addison,Berkeley, early ’70’s. Almost everyone in my old Berkeley neighborhood had a nickname. There was “Walking Wally” who dressed daily in a safari outfit (complete with pith helmet) and walked a huge Old English Sheep dog all over town for hours on end. His housemate, Eddie, also … [read more]

O'Keeffe Woodworks

27 March, 2018

Doing Just This One Thing

I don’t think anyone twisted my arm in the business environment and forced me to adopt the misguided notion of “multi-tasking”, which first showed up on the business landscape in 1965, referring to the capabilities of an IBM System/365 computer.

Someone thought it wise that we emulate machines. We can’t count on the corporate world to safeguard our health or sanity. Health and sanity are not metrics on a P&L.

I count myself guilty of including a line on many a job description such as “Must be good at multi-tasking”. I have included such a line on my own CV.

While it was a popular aspect of being an efficient executive time manager (picture the staff of Sorkin’s The West Wing, bustling about, juggling air strikes and whip counts while flirting and mugging as they walked) the practice and its promised benefits have been debunked by all manner of scientists and psychologists, and some studies show corporate America losing two-thirds of a trillion dollars annually due to multi-tasking (Matt Richtel, NYT, 2008).

But the expectation persists, and, in my view, no, it is not “caused” by e-mail any more than workplace misbehavior is “caused” by workplaces being co-educational.

But nobody made me do it. My penchant to please superiors, an over-active brain and insufficient awareness did that for me.

I have trained myself out of some of it, and have become selective and sequential doing tasks, but there is another aspect to this affliction that I need more attention to and practice with. I avoid, as much as is practical, choosing to do more than one thing at a time. I am comfortable asking others to wait until I can attend to their need or question.

But I remain a fully addicted planner and commentator. I often am doing while thinking about the doing or the next doing. I just now rolled the trash cans out to the street through wet, brilliant white snow and sorted out where I will publish and post this piece, all in my head. Surely I missed something about the snow.

As a writer, there is an added aspect to this addiction. All too often, as I am doing something, in my head, I am writing about it. It reminds me of a quote I cannot find the exact words to, from Nathaniel West, (either the graphic artist or the author) that goes, roughly, “Tracing the shadow of the hand that traces.”

While I am not actually doing the next thing, I am mentally and physically preparing for it. Unloading the dishes, I know I will sort my laundry next. I have broken a few dishes this way. Driving home, I feel the pull of exactly how I will enter the house, where I will put things away I acquired in town, the email reply I need to do, (but first I’ll grab a chunk of that good brie) and the sequence of responsibilities needing my attention before I can watch Rachel with a glass of wine. I only have twenty minutes. Go!

While planning and project management are fully worthwhile standalone activities, if done consciously, done in conjunction with other tasks, the combination leaves me unfulfilled and separated from my life. Like I ate the menu.

The cure is easily said, difficult to realize. Doing just this one thing, even if it is planning or reviewing, right now, all by itself, is that cure. Lists and calendars help as well.

For me, fear drives this. I think that fear is deeply held, that I will drop the ball, forget to do something I promised, let someone down, or worse, be embarrassed. Be ashamed. Not be seen as the image of Geoff I created for myself. That guy who gets stuff done.

This cure involves trust. In reality, there is little chance I am going to forget to pick up milk in town, or call my brother.

I need to practice this trust, all day, as well as remembering that the expansive intimacy with my own life that is available by doing just this one thing shines so much more brightly than the unlikely possibility of forgetting to put my pants on before leaving the house.

That intimacy is at once deeply tactile and textural while feeling like free fall.

What’s the worst that can happen?

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