Read This If You Do One Thing At A Time
Read This If You Do One Thing At A Time
Those of you who have been readers for the past couple years know my feelings about “multi-tasking.”
Read This If You Do One Thing At A Time
By chris danilo on Feb 22, 2020 05:00 am
Those of you who have been readers for the past couple years know my feelings about “multi-tasking.”
There is plenty of evidence that doing multiple things at once means you don’t do any of them well. That’s fine if the tasks are small and the consequences of failure are low-risk.
You might not need to hit 6-Sigma level industry standards if you’re just folding pizza boxes or sealing envelopes.
For everything else, though, it’s usually worth it to just focus on one thing at a time.
But that’s not good enough!
I want to do all the things!
I want to be productive while I sleep!
Me too.
So, how do we do multiple things at once, without actually doing multiple things at once?
Okay, brace yourselves for this super boring, unsexy, nerd answer:
Do stuff that compounds or does double-duty for you.
Yep.
Building tools and systems are one way to achieve this.
They allow us to apply the same effort and get way better leverage.
The bicycle is a perfect example. A bicycle might take days or weeks to make–or it might take a chunk of cash to buy–but once you’ve got one, you can move literally 3 – 10 times faster than pedestrians.
Same effort. Way better output.
Make your work do double-duty.
The next level is thinking about how you can then turn that same energy you’re putting into the bicycle into something else that’s useful to you, like exercise, or eliminating your carbon emissions.
Now you’re not only going faster, but you’re increasing your heart rate and burning carbohydrates, not hydrocarbons! Cool!
If you’re a marketer, this might mean taking that YouTube interview you did and turning it into a podcast or quick checklist for your audience.
If you’re a teacher, this might mean using your garden to teach biology, chemistry, and cooking skills in the same lesson.
If you’re a software engineer, this might mean using code you’ve already built and either refactoring it to use less CPU or just updating some parameters to make it solve a new problem.
Multi-tasking is out.
Single-tasking on work that does double-duty is in!
If you keep chasing more work I promise that’s what you’ll get.
But if you look for more ways to put the wind at your back you’ll get more done and you’ll still have time left over.
Prefer to work on things that provide multiple benefits.
2 Minute Action:
Check-in with your partner, co-founder, teammate, or your own personal to-do list.
Look at all the work you’re doing and call out some areas of focus (marketing, operations, finance).
Create a Venn diagram, triangle, or whatever you need to create to visualize the overlap between those areas of focus.
You might not magically come up with ideas immediately and that’s okay, but put a post-it note or reminder of this diagram somewhere you’ll see it.
I’ve found that when the question keeps knocking on my door, I start to see answers in my day-to-day that I might not have seen before.
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