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Phrase: Stretched too thin
We’ve all been there.
I have, and you have, too.
We’ve felt like we’ve been stretched too thin, and soon something will snap.
As Bilbo Baggins once said, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
Now, I can forgive you if you think he was complaining about having too much bread or perhaps too little butter.
If that’s what you think, you are incorrect.
To be stretched too thin means trying to do too many things simultaneously and doing a poor job at all of them.
In other words, it’s the curse of the multitasker to be stretched too thin.
People, you see, cannot multitask.
We can either do one thing or the other, but we cannot do both at the same time.
While you may think you’re multitasking, your mind is switching very quickly from one thing to the other: back and forth, back and forth.
Our brain is a wonderful muscle, and while it may be able to do this for a while, eventually, the constant switching back and forth will become too much to handle.
This is when our stress level skyrockets, and we feel stretched too thin.
At this point, people need to take a break.
If they don’t, bad things may happen.
Everyone who feels stretched too thin will eventually snap.
This snap can manifest itself in various ways.
Some may become flustered and irritable, others depressed, and still, other people may become angry and even go postal.
Remember, you can’t multitask.
Humans are not computers.
Pretending we are more productive and master multitaskers is only fooling ourselves.
When you start to feel stretched too thin, be sure to take a break.
Have some bread and butter with a cup of tea.
You’ll be surprised how good it’ll make you feel.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 81.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.