Stay on task

I have gotten really bad at staying focused. Not that I was much good at it before, but now I'm hopeless. So, what to do? I read something somewhere about some Zen monks that did one thing at a time until it was done, then moved on to the next thing. These guys would tend to the garden when it was time to garden and when it was time to eat they would cook the food, do the dishes, then sit down to eat.

That's pretty hard to do when you are expected to multitask, but it really makes sense to focus on doing the task at hand. Try telling that to the boss, though. So I'm trying to adopt a method that includes a to do list, working on the first item until I can't go any farther with it for whatever reason, then moving on to the second item, etc. Kinda like working in series, then switching to parallel when the circuit craps out.

Of course, with my feeble brain I need to keep note of where I left off on the last task.