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“The quality of our lives is determined by the focus of our attention.” So says meditation teacher, Cheri Huber. Everything you experience gets filtered through your attention. If your attention is scattered and unfocused, your personal experience will be, too.
Today, I want to address two specific unhealthy attentional practices and give you some practice ideas to overcome them.
Multitasking is the act of performing two or more tasks simultaneously. Sounds efficient, but the problem is it’s not physically possible for the brain to do two tasks at once. 
Instead, the brain hypertasks, that is it switches attention very rapidly between tasks, so rapidly that you don’t even notice. The downside of hypertasking is that performance on all the tasks takes a hit. Yes, you can Instagram and write your term paper at the same time, but neither task will be performed as effectively as it would if it were the only thing you were attending to. 
When I present this information to students I often get push-back. “I can do both at the same time and I get good grades.” Certainly, you can hypertask between these two activities, but the “good grades” you’re achieving aren’t necessarily as good as they could be if you focused your attention. “Good” in this case typically means “good enough for me.” 
If you want to see how multitasking affects performance, try this exercise. Get a piece of paper and a pen, and set your phone up to time the activity. Draw two lines on the paper. Time yourself as you write “I am a great multitasker” on the first line, then the numbers from 1 to 20 on the second line. Write as fast as you can. 
Next, draw two more lines on which you’ll write the same sentence and number sequence. Time yourself, but this time alternate writing a letter in the sentence with writing a number in the number sequence. M then 1, u then 2, etc. Took a hit on the time, didn’t you? 
Another downside of hypertasking is that it can zap your energy. Sometimes, there’s not much of a hit. For example, you can likely walk and chew gum at the same time without exhausting yourself. But, have you ever come home from a day of working at your desk and wondered why you felt physically beat? Maybe it’s because you were finishing up a report while monitoring email, dealing with multiple interruptions from co-workers, and prepping for a meeting all at the same time.
Our other poor attentional practice, continuous partial attention, is not quite the same as multitasking. It’s the act of paying a bit of attention to something, continuously. If, for example, you always have your email client open on your desktop and you’re monitoring for incoming email, you’re paying continuous partial attention to your email. Whereas we multitask to be more efficient and productive, we engage in continuous partial attention because we don’t want to miss out on anything. 
Continuous partial attention is exhausting and stressful. Says Linda Stone, who coined the term:

Like so many things, in small doses, continuous partial attention can be a very functional behavior. However, in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we’re inaccessible. The latest, greatest powerful technologies have contributed to our feeling increasingly powerless. (1) 

Linda Stone says the fix for the negative effects of continuous partial attention is to manage your attention better...