Do one thing at a time

Want to improve focus and productivity? Do one thing at a time

Reference: Want to improve focus and productivity? Do one thing at a time

One thing at a time is a whole philosophy of life, one that treats your goals as important enough to be worth bringing into being, while not pretending that your reserves of time or energy are infinite. It represents a commitment to actually achieving a few of your ambitions, rather than wallowing in comforting fantasies of achieving them all.

1. The single most effective ingredient for focus is to improve your capacity for doing only one thing at a time.
2. The urge do to many things at once should be resisted.
3. By doing one thing at a time, we live within the limits of what our brain could actually handle. We will feel our attention growing and improving.
4. Indeed, we can not do many things at once, since what’s really happening is that our attention is alternating, rapidly and exhaustingly
5. One main reason that focusing on one thing at a time is harder than it looks is that doing several things at once is usually a way of assuaging anxiety.
   1. When we are drowning in to-dos, it’s calming to feel that we are addressing lots of them simultaneously.
   2. When everything is urgent, postponement feels like a luxury we can’t afford. But that’s the anxiety talking. The fact is that we can’t afford not to postpone almost everything, at any given moment, if we want to make progress on anything. So a big part of the skill of doing one thing at a time is learning to handle the discomfort associated with knowing what we are not getting done.
   3. When we think our life is a mess – we feel like we should be exercising more, sorting out our finances, improving our relationship with your kids, and on and on – it’s similarly reassuring to feel we are tackling all those critical issues, not just one.
   4. But the feeling is deceptive.
6. The costs of “task-switching” are bad: when we flit between activities, we waste time and energy regaining a state of focus again and again. Worse, each activity becomes a way of avoiding every other activity. So when a task feels difficult or scary – as tasks that matter often do – we just bounce off to another one instead. The result isn’t merely that we make a smaller amount of progress on a larger number of fronts; it’s that we make less progress overall.
7. There are limits, of course: we can’t put our job on hold while working on a poetry collection, or press pause on parenting while we work on getting fit. But we can constantly seek to move our life in the direction of having as few projects as possible on our plate at any one time.

Take aways

1. When you are working on something, if you come across something else that is interesting, you should not get deviated or distracted from what you were initially doing.
2. Instead, just make a note of the points, links, resources, etc. about that interesting topic. And schedule a time slot for it.
3. Use your organization system, like org agenda files, effectively.
4. Put that topic away and get back to what you were doing and finish it.

Tags

1. Switch-cost effect and Attention Residue
2. Distractions Are Potential Killers. Be stubborn. Don’t let go of projects.