Everyone like this - "I can multitask". In fact, there are interviews that the interviewer would ask if the interviewee have the quality to multitask. Then what happens when such a person says no? I will take a few words from Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by - Greg McKeown.
“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.
Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things.
People and companies routinely try to do just that. One leader told me of this experience in a company that talked of “Pri-1, Pri-2, Pri-3, Pri-4, and Pri-5.” This gave the impression of many things being the priority but actually meant nothing was.”
I think we can truly do multiple things at the same time. Eating snacks and watching TV. Or, answering call and replying message. These are the simple ways of multitasking, but certain things need absolute concentration.
Multitasking forces your brain to switch front and back often and you will lose concentration. You may not notice it. But assuming you are writing codes to build a function and you are, at the same time writing an article on Pythagoras theorem. These are completely two entities and every time you switch, your brain will take a few sec to start again.
According to a study by International Journal of Information Management published in 2003, every time you check a mail it will take an average of 64 sec to get you back to your previous task.
Doing multiple things at the same time will not hand you a great result. Picking your tasks one by one will give better and clear results. You will work accurately on a single task at once than switching your brain multiple times on tasks you label priorities.
I wake up every day with many tasks in mind. As much that I love to engage with so many posts on Hive, my tasks wouldn’t allow me. So most times, I list out the priorities and pick one priority to start with. You can set out your tasks for the day and pick one that must be done to start. I wrote a blog a few days ago on Eisenhower box on shifting tasks that could be neglected. Some times we mark tasks that are not relevant as priorities and we focus on the wrong thing.
Are you Busy?
We hide under the shadow of busyness. We pack up tasks that could be delegated to someone or deleted to junk up our lives. Not everything that comes our way we pay attention to. Our productivity should lie in making meaning to our life. Making value to our life and the world around us. You can't take up all tasks at once. I have a friend that claim been busy always, but whenever I asked him the task he executed through the day, he talked about the task he will do the next day. This shows he could finish nothing.
Productivity lies in having a priority at a time. We need to know when to be busy and when to be committed to just a task. You need a priority, not priorities.
