I am not a multitasker. People who have the capacity to take on multiple projects and see them through successfully amaze me. I am obsessively driven and each individual project requires my total focus or I quickly become distracted and scattered. The end result is a myriad of partial thoughts and projects that have no connection to each other and no individual value. When the volume of uncompleted work reaches critical mass I tend to shelve everything and start the cycle over. Over the past couple of years with a great deal of self-discipline and a lot of straight up prayer my ability to focus has improved substantially. Still I am careful not to take on more than one major project at a time.
Recently I made the mistake of trying to read two books at the same time—“Home (A Short History of an Idea)” by Witold Rybczynski and a collection of Raymond Carver short stories—the result was a melding of the two as I jumped between them and I suddenly I was reading about a broken alcoholic man in Louis V’s Versailles. He was drinking cheap gin in a Rococo palace wondering why his wife left him while appreciating the advent of horsehair cushions. This valuable lesson was not lost on me as I try to balance writing my book with the house I’m working on. They are two different projects but equally demanding of creative solutions.
Fortunately the house with its wainscoting and bannisters has an end in sight and then I can get back to what’s important.
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