Special
Features / October 2007
Stop The Insanity - Focus
First let’s refine our perception of “multi-tasking”. Multi-tasking isn’t planning ahead and recognizing that if you turn the oven on it can be heating while you’re putting a load of clothes in the washer so they can be washing while you prepare dinner. That’s efficiency not multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is when you try to read your email, write a report, and give someone a verbal message while you’re talking on the phone. When you do that everything takes you longer.
Your brain simply isn’t wired that way. When you try to multi-task you aren’t focused on anything, everything takes longer, and you make more mistakes than you normally would if you just focused. Stop this insanity. Focus on one thing at a time so you can move to the next thing quicker and/or take a much needed break. When you’re trying to read your email or write something at the same time as you’re talking to someone else either on the phone or in person you are creating yourslf extreme stress.
Rather than trying to deal with everything as it comes, try checking and responding to your email no more than 1-3 times a day. When you check your email every time a new message arrives in your inbox you’re not only losing the 2-5 minutes you spend on the email, but your losing the time it takes you to return to what you were working on and get regrouped.
With all that starting, stopping, and regrouping you feeling stressed out and overwhelmed because you feel inundated by a sea of endless tasks. Answering the phone and stopping your work just because it rings or talking with anyone who happens to walk by just doesn’t work.
You may not have a door you can close or someone who can act as a filter for you, but you can rely on your ability to focus. Have you ever noticed how mothers can drive around with a car full of screaming kids and not even notice all the noise? That’s because they’ve trained themselves to focus in spite of all this apparent chaos. It’s actually a matter of self-preservation through focus, but isn’t that what you’re faced with too? Aren’t you to the point where you're just stressed out and overwhelmed by too much stimuli keeping you from being productive.
Focus is your self-preservation self-discipline tool that will enable you to survive and thrive in highly demanding situations.
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