Single Tasking (Death to Multitasking)

You walk into your worst class ever, or a weekly project meeting that never seems to accomplish much. At this point you know the drill: sit down, listen for 4.5 minutes, zone out, scribble a picture in the margins of your notebook, look around at the other people clearly in denial about their need to sleep… and decide to pull out your phone.

You can easily write a few emails, or maybe start typing up your groccery list. It’s fine because you can just look up from time to time and get the notes you need without issue!

This is what you likely know to be multitasking, and it sounds awesome because it really would save you time and energy to be able to handle a few important things at once. It’s just not really a habit that plays out as you hope it does when you actually try it.

Alright. Why Does This Matter?

Why we should all ditch multitasking and work on single tasks and focus:

  • Multitasking in reality is just quick bursts of single tasking.
    • Consider a computer and a smartphone: A PC can have several programs running at once each in a visible window. A smartphone opens and forces full attention and control to ONLY ONE APP at a time. We operate like smartphones, not computers.
    • if you tackle 5 tasks at once, you are actually doing them sequentially in small time chunks.
    • The issue with switching between several tasks quickly is that you often end up losing your train of thought and spending time trying to find where you left off, which adds up quickly to a lot of wasted time.
  • finishing one task first can give you a mental boost because you have actually accomplished something.
    • The good feeling you get simply by finishing up a single task can really help your momentum and keep you motivated to start and finish another (and another, and another…).
  • It’s less stressful.
    • Being able to dedicate your entire mental capacity to a single task is actually significantly easier than dividing your attention among several tasks.
    • Consider that if you work on 2 tasks, you dedicate a bit of attention to the first, a bit to the 2nd, and even some to the task of determining when to switch between the two. So, doing 2 tasks simultaneously splits your attention into at least 3 parts, whereas doing a single task can more likely keep your attention focused on 1 thing only.   ###Cool. So What do I do?

You need to build up your ability to focus on a single task. This takes time and practice, and really it’s not likely that you’ll ever be perfect at it (that’s ok though, it’s still valuable) but you certainly will get the same amount or more work done than before and you’ll feel less stressed out too.

The quickest way to cut down on multitasking tendencies:

  • maximize the windows of your programs on your computer and hide your taskbar
    • the idea is just to hide the digital distractions that are constantly present when you’re working
  • put your phone on silent. Even better is to use Airplane mode
    • your smartphone is full of distractions, it’s best to put it out of sight and out of mind when you really need to focus on your work
  • go somewhere with no distractions or where it’s socially unacceptable to indulge in distractions
    • a library is the perfect candidate: you have to stay quiet, you can’t get up and do chores, there’s not much to look at, and other people around you are working hard and you can’t be rude by distracting them

More, Please!

This article poses an interesting idea about distraction and its real source:

http://99u.com/articles/51300/why-are-we-so-distracted-all-the-time

Up next

Building Your Focus