First off apologies for such a long delay in posts. I’ve been extremely busy and let my blog drift into the realm of non-priority. I’ll keep this post short in an attempt to get the ball rolling.
Last week I attended a leadership conference that my company put on. I was honored to attend as it required an invitation. The people attending were amazing and we had very senior leadership participating (think people that are responsible for thousands of employees). We covered a number of topics and I plan to write blogs on many of them, but the first blog is going to be about multi-tasking. You may be asking, why did they teach you about multi-tasking at a leadership conference. The reason is, trying to multi-tasking wastes your time, wastes the people around you’s time, and is often times rude. I’ve read numerous productivity books, I frequent Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits and Cal Newport’s, Study Hacks among other sites. Guess what, they same the same thing as the leaders of my organization. If you try to do too many things at once, you will not get anything done. It has to do with how our brains work. Whether it is how we are built or how we are conditioned to function, I am not sure, what I am sure about is… to get something done you should focus your undivided attention on it.
Turn off email alerts, stop texting, stop checking twitter, stop checking Facebook unless your job is to monitor and interact with these services, every time they ding and you look, that is minutes of lost focus on the work at hand. Over the past 5 days I am averaging close to 150 emails coming in across all of my email accounts. If I check each of these emails when they come in and assume it takes me a total of 2 minutes to read an email, respond or file, and get back to what I was doing. Believe me 2 minutes is unrealistically optimistic, most people take anywhere from 5 to 15. Sticking with 2 minutes I just spent 5 hours a day managing my email box. If I use 15, that would be 37.5 hours. When am I going to get anything done? Short answer is, I will not get anything done. I have to filter out the noise.
Understanding that to get something done I need to focus on it for set periods of time, I turn off all alerts, isolate myself, and get to work. This may be 20 minute stretches, this may be 1 hour stretches. Personally I can’t focus for more than an hour with out needing a quick break to recharge. If someone needs to talk to me urgently, they can call me, or walk over and talk to me. My job does not consist of handling 150 emergencies a day that require my immediate attention.
There are whole books on this topic, people write their dissertations on it, so I could go on and on. But I promised not to. So in summary, do not multi-task. Do multiple tasks one after the other with focus. Filter out the noise that keeps you from focusing. Try these things and you will be surprised how much more you can accomplish.
