Keep Going

Audio and Austin Kleon

I recently signed up for the free trial of Audible books (behind the eight ball much??!! I know, right?). Namely because I was trying to be cheap and get a bundle of 3 books by Austin Kleon for free, and not buy each book individually. More on that in a minute.

So I signed up for the free Audible trial [AFFILIATE LINK] and downloaded my books, and plugged in my headphones, and started doing whatever else I wanted to do at the same time as listening and…. Promptly stopped listening. To be fair the book was still going, Austin was still reading away, and speaking into my ears, but I had stopped listening.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a girl studying Engineering at university. She used to share a house with a few house mates, one of which tuned in quickly to a particular trait of this girl… If she was busy doing something, and the housemate said something or asked a question, those words would flow into the girl’s ear, down her body and get stuck in her knee, before eventually finding their way back up to her brain for processing, in due time when she had finished whatever other task she had been doing. Now, the girl didn’t realise it, but it was certainly a point of frustration and/or hilarity for the housemate, who would get their answer some minutes later, probably completely out of context and potentially also useless at this later juncture.

Now, back to present day, and motherhood and the multitasking era of Busy. It is always purported that women are spectacular multitaskers, and this becomes more apparently a necessary skill as number of children >1. But… It. Is. So. Tiring. It is so tiring switching gears all the time and chopping and changing what your brain needs to work on/react to (spilled drinks, concentrating on information on how to grow your business, protecting a child from stairs, listening to an audio book….)

Where do Austin Kleon and his books fit in to all this? Well, nowhere. That’s the point!  I tried listening to the books, I tried fast speed, I tied slow speed. I tried writing notes. I ended up needing to go back and forth so many times, rewinding and fast forwarding, that in the end I gave up. Maybe my whole premise was wrong from the outset, that I could multitask and listen to a book AND do x, y, z at the same time? I’m not talking listening to an audio book and writing a paper on nuclear physics at the same time, but you know, doing something else with my hands. I guess I still suffer from Stuck In the Knee syndrome. Sigh.

But wait… Maybe this is not such a bad thing? Why did I even feel that I should be doing at least one more thing than just listening? If I was reading a book, I would never have presumed that I would be able to do anything other than read the book (ok, maybe travel passively, eg on a train, plane or something) but not sew and read at the same time?

So, eventually I gave up. I bought “Keep Going”, the third of the books, and the one that appealed to me most of the three, in a physical format (ebooks vs physical? That’s a whole other rant…) And guess what? It was so RELAXING sitting there, perusing this book, which by the way is explicitly visual, made by someone who works visually and with visual media, for artists…. I mean, it is definitely a book made to be LOOKED at. And only look at the book, and not try to do anything else contemporaneously.

There’s also the question of books on tape, well, at least that’s what we still call them in our house, a throwback to analogue times, when books really were on cassette tapes… We listen to stories in the car, specially my daughters do, on long and short car trips (even just around the corner, there is always the request for one story or another…) But even that sometimes, I find myself distracted from driving, and listening to a story I have heard several hundred times before. Imagine if I was actually trying to concentrate on it? I think I must definitely be mono track and not stereo let alone four track.

Is there something about concentration and level of engagement? I feel instinctively that if I am reading a book, I ought to concentrate and read deeply the meaning behind the words on the page, at least to give it my full attention. This might be a hangover from a life studying. I have to admit, I don’t quite feel this same level of commitment/concertation is warranted for podcasts. I have no trouble listening to a podcast and driving, though sometimes I am aware that I have gaps in what was said, as I approach an intersection, or obviously more directly focus on driving. Some people espouse the virtues of audio book listening while sewing and quilting. I find it far too distracting. Either I miss the story as I am busy concentrating on something I am doing, or I stop quilting/sewing to listen to the story.

Maybe this is just a particularly bad case of bad wiring, sending my signals down through my knee, or maybe it’s more common than I thought. Do you suffer from Stuck in the Knee Syndrome too?