Single Tasking and Productivity – Part 1

Single Tasking and Productivity – Part 1

This is the beginning of a series that I hope will help you focus on the task at hand. Some sage advice from focusmanifesto.com

‘Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.’ ~Alexander Graham Bell

Many of us grew up in the age of multi-tasking, where you couldn’t call yourself productive if you weren’t a good multi-tasker. We learned to always have several balls in the air at once — while writing something on the computer, we had a phone call going, we were writing something on a notepad or paper form, we were reviewing documents, and sometimes even holding a meeting at the same time. That’s the productive worker, the effective executive.

When email and Instant Messaging and blogs and the rest of the Internet came along, multi-tasking went haywire. Now we’re expected to do 10 things on the computer at once, still with the paper, phone, and meetings going, along with texting and Blackberry Messaging. Multi-tasking is no longer about being productive — it’s a way of living.

It’s not a sane way of living, however, and it’s not necessarily the most effective way of working either. A few notes on why:

• Multi-tasking is less efficient, due to the need to switch gears for each new task, and then switch back again.
• Multi-tasking is more complicated, and thus more prone to stress and errors.
• Multi-tasking can be crazy, and in this already chaotic world, we need to reign in terror and find a little oasis of sanity and calm.
• Our brains can really only handle one thing at a time, and so we get so used to switching between one thing and another with our brains that we program them to have a short attention span. This is why it’s so hard to learn to focus on one thing at a time again.

Follow along, where next time we will focus on living a single-tasking life.