Our modern lives are like living with hundreds of windows and tabs open on our computer. If your computer was continuously left with loads of tabs open and we were opening new tabs all the time, then it would eventually crash. If you opened a program that was particularly resource heavy and the fan was running hot, the computer would need all the resource it could get and would struggle to perform efficiently with all these other tabs open. Our mind and our brains are the same. They need time out in order to reboot from time to time, to do some of the background processing, to give the fan a break, and we need to distribute our resource efficiently. To handle particularly challenging times in our life we may need a lot of mental power, a lot of creativity, and a lot of openness. When things really go wrong, and life is flipped on its head, we need all the resource, openness, calm, and inner strength that we can muster. We can't do that if we have tons of tabs open and we're trying to multitask so many things at once on a daily basis.

Mindful presence teaches us how to restore a sense of balance, a sense of ease, and a sense of preparedness. This means that sometimes multitasking is not the healthiest thing for us. Research has shown that our brains are not nearly as good at handling multiple tasks as we like to think they are. In fact, some researchers suggest that multitasking can actually reduce productivity by as much as 40%. According to Buddhist psychology, in one moment of mind, which may be as brief as one millisecond, your attention can only be focused on one thing. While we have the illusion of focusing on multiple things at once, our attention is actually jumping rapidly from one sense field to another continuously, and the mind makes sense of all of this input, and this is how we experience reality. When we multitask, we're splitting our attention even further, and this has been found to not be very productive, and not very healthy for our body-mind system.

A Practical Guide to Mindful Living by David Johnson