The magic of always-connected era means that you can access your email, calendar, to-do list, text messages, and much more all at the same time. In theory, this tool should allow you to nimbly bounce between many different tasks, completing each as they arise. But we all know that it’s not that simple: all of these features end up distracting from one another, forcing you to leave tasks incomplete. How often have you been trying to write an important business email when suddenly you receive a phone call? And even if you’d like to talk to that person, you’ve probably wished that you could just finish that message before getting trapped in a conversation for the next twenty minutes.
What can you do? We’re all slaves to these things now, right? Well, there are a couple of adages worth bearing in mind. First, your phone exists for your convenience, not others. And related, these always-connected devices have both silent and off switches. It may be hard, but you’ve got to start using them if you want to do your best work.
But I’m a great multitasker, I hear you say. Except that no one really is, as Candice Galek explains for Inc.com in her article, Why Single-Tasking is the New Multi-Tasking in 2018: “The American Psychological Association found that when people try to perform more than one task at a time, they do worse at both tasks, because the human brain is not designed for multitasking.” You can think of multitasking as doing two undesirable tasks at the same time, hoping each will distract you from the other. You’re going to do neither well nor quickly as a consequence.
Galek goes on to explain that you should try to cluster related activities together throughout your day so that you don’t over task your mind. Check email all at once, schedule similar meetings back-to-back, and so on. This philosophy is called “time blocking”.
Mike Weinberg extols the value of this in his article, Permission Granted to Block Your Calendar, Focus on High-Payoff Activity and Become Unavailable for Short Periods of Time. In order to produce quality results, he explains that you need to “Stop trying to do everything at once” and that you need to “Become completely unavailable to inbound communication and other forms of distraction.”
Weinberg continues, “highly successful executives, leaders, and sellers […] time block their calendars. They have a clearly defined list of a select few high-value, high-payoff activities, and they exercise the discipline of making appointments with themselves to work exclusively on one of these…” If you want to take control of all the noise, time blocking—combined with “Do Not Disturb”—is the answer.
But this discipline takes a lot of practice. Don’t go it alone: reach out to The Brandt Group today to learn more about our leadership classes and seminars where we put a heavy emphasis on prioritizing and task management.
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