Suzi the Pug waiting for her treat
Multi-tasking sucks.
No, really, it sucks: it sucks the quality out of your work; it mischievously and devilishly sucks the time out of your day; and it has you spinning is circles so that it feels like nothing gets completed.
Since the 1960’s, researchers have studied people’s ability to multi-task and have determined that our brains aren’t hardwired to focus on more than one thing at any given time and therefore tasks take longer and generally commit more errors. Do a Google search – it’s crazy how much is written about how bad it is.
Despite this, how often in our daily professional lives do we try to answer the phone, respond to email and “just” respond to a quick FB post? In our personal life: cook dinner, feed the dog, call someone to coordinate a play date/carpool/dinner date later that week, and be thinking about that meeting tomorrow morning?
Working from home – do you work on the computer with the TV on? The radio on? Have a video training/conference going while you are responding to email? Yep… that’s all multi-tasking.
We all do this. Problem is that it isn’t helpful when days are so full that you feel overwhelmed or start to let important tasks slide to the “later” list. (And since we know that “Later = Never” often enough, it becomes a problem.)
Taking the time to really put your attention on one task is critical to success.
Scheduling is a tool to achieve single-tasking. It doesn’t have to mean you have to live and die by a calendar with the whole day blocked into activities. Scheduling looks like different things to different people, perhaps you just need to make one hour of quiet time per day to get one project done this week.
I’ve worked with a creative person who found that strict calendars were making her crazy, but if she had “buckets” of time in her week she could ramp up her productivity 200% and still feel like she had flexibility and time to play.
It can be breaking your week into designated “areas” (Marketing on Monday, Bookkeeping on Friday.) Maybe it’s breaking unpleasant but unavoidable tasks into 15 minute chunks (I do this for phone call backs) and then switch to something more pleasant.
There are all kinds of ways to do this, but the end goal is always to make it so that you can really pay attention to one thing at a time. You just have to find the thing that works for you.
So, thinking about your project/goal right now – what’s the one thing that you could do to make the biggest impact this week?
Now, find a way to spend the time with just that one next step. Set the rest of your life aside, and just focus for a short time.
Tell me your goal – that one big thing – and what happens when you single-task it for a little bit of time every day. Email me at j@jenellnewell.com. I’d love to hear what you’re up to and if this helps forward your progress.