How to Become Radically Productive
Today more than ever there is an endless amount of demands stacked on our shoulders.
Grow your business, focus on your career, start a family, be a good parent, see the world, and have unforgettable experiences. So much to do, so little time.
We like to think that the problems we face are new and unique to our era but for millennia we’ve struggled with being busy and we’ve constantly sought ways to be more productive. This is something philosophers spoke about ages ago.
Socrates said, “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”
Marcus Aurelius admired others for their purpose and self-control, “Alexander the Platonist — Not to be constantly telling people ( or writing them) that I’m too busy, unless I really am. Similarly, not to be always ducking my responsibilities to the people around me because of ‘pressing business’.”
We all want the same thing, to do the most we possibly can in the limited amount of time we have.
As a society, we have an obsession with doing more, achieving more, having more experiences, and sharing more of our lives. We’re obsessed with Carpe Diem-ing the hell out of everything.
Sadly, for many of us, as each day passes we get buried deeper and deeper under the weight of our to-do list. Despite the effort expended, the list only grows.
The only solution left to combat this without sacrificing our lives? Multitasking.
Watch Netflix and work on a financial spreadsheet. Write a term paper and chat with your friends on Gchat. Work on an important presentation and answer questions on Slack. Scroll through Instagram and spend quality time with your kids.
In an effort to do more and perhaps out of desperation we try to cheat the system and save time by doing multiple things simultaneously. We foolishly profess our abilities to multitask, like it’s some unique skill only a few posses.
Of course, you can do two things at once: watch tv and eat food, sing and take a shower, pat your head and rub your belly, but that doesn’t mean you can concentrate on two things at the same.
In reality, we can do none of that. Even worse, by multitasking, our efforts to be more productive, efficient, and effective are completely nullified. We are worse off because we try to do so much simultaneously, which in turn puts us further in a whole. The more we work, the more we toil away, the deeper we get.
If you want to be more productive, more effective, and better at everything you do, the answer is simple: do one thing at a time. Forget trying to multitask, it’s a fool’s errand. It’s time to quit this destructive habit. Your work, life, and relationships will all suffer as a consequence of trying to do it all simultaneously.
Be better by doing less.
It’s time to stop multitasking.
The Multitasking Myth
Here’s the truth about multitasking, it’s physically impossible to focus on two things at once. Did you hear that? It’s time to face the music and admit we were wrong. We can’t do two things at once well.
Say it with me, “Hi I’m (insert name here), and I’m a multitasking addict. I used to believe I could do two things at the same time. One time, I even tried to make the audacious leap of doing three things at the same time. However, after writing my economics term paper while watching the Game of Thrones finale, I turned in a paper where I mistakenly wove in GOT dialogue instead of explaining the diamond-water paradox of value. That’s when I hit rock bottom. It was time for me to stop multitasking.”
See, doesn’t that feel better? The first step to recovery is admitting you have a multitasking problem.
Joking aside, here’s the reason multitasking doesn’t work, we can’t focus on multiple things at the same time. When trying to do two things at the same time what our brain actually does is bounce between singular tasks. For example, each time we jump from writing an email to talking on the phone at the same time there is a start and stop process involved. This creates a lag period and is costly in terms of the energy required to jump between activities.
As neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains, when multitasking, “you end up fractionating your attention into little bits and pieces, not really engaging fully in any one thing. All that switching across tasks comes with a neurobiological cost. It depletes resources. So after an hour or two of attempting to multitask, if we find that we’re tired and we can’t focus, it’s because those very neural chemicals we needed to focus are now gone.”
By trying to do two things simultaneously, the end result is you are more inefficient and ineffective than ever which is the exact opposite outcome you hoped for by multitasking.
The quality of work done on each task suffers. Your energy is depleted.
The Cost Of Switching Tasks
When you multitask what you don’t do is work on two things at the same time, what you actually do is bounce between tasks, and there’s a huge cost to this.
In 1995 two researchers, Robert Rogers and Stephen Monsell, set out to investigate the cost associated with bouncing between two independent types of tasks.
They tested subjects by having them perform two independent tasks: identify a set of numbers as odd or even and identify a set of letters as a consonant or vowel. They had the subjects perform the tasks in two trials, non-switch trials and in switch trials, i.e. perform the task of identifying a sequence of numbers or letters in separate tests or jump between identifying numbers and letters in the same test.
The results were remarkable. When having to jump from task to task (identifying numbers and letters in the same test), it took subjects much longer to complete each task and with a higher error rate.
Consider this in how many of us operate while working.
We sit down to perform financial analysis, four minutes in we see an email has come in and we switch over to our inbox to check to see that it’s not an urgent email. You tell yourself, “I’ll answer it later.” You switch back to your analysis and spend a few minutes trying to remember where you left off.
How do you think that analysis will go? From the research, we can accurately estimate that it will take you much longer to perform that task and you’ll have a greater chance of making a mistake in your spreadsheet.
If you want to work faster, smarter, and with fewer errors, start batching activities.
Focus on one line of work for extended blocks of time. It’s nearly impossible to get into a rhythm if you are constantly starting and stopping and switching between different types of work.
Stop Defining Success Based On How “Busy” You Are
“What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?” -Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism
For many of us, we measure our success based on how busy we are.
Unfortunately, busy is not a measurable achievement. We think, “I’ve been so busy, therefore I must be doing a lot.” You may be doing a lot, but you’re most likely just doing a lot poorly.
The reason we fall back on busy as a measure of success is we haven’t stopped to consider what our benchmark for accomplishment actually is. We haven’t stopped to define a vision for our lives. Therefore we fall back on activity and not progress because activity and feeling busy are much easier to track. In fact, it doesn’t require any tracking, it’s just how overwhelmed we feel at the end of the day. Tracking progress requires patience. Making progress takes time.
With busyness as our measurement for success, we commit to an unsustainable and unachievable level of activity. We overcommit leaving ourselves with insufficient time to do it all. In a state of desperation, the only option left is to multitask.
Here’s a challenge, when someone asks you how you’re doing, stop responding with “busy”. Trust me, it’s much harder to do than you think because it means you must take the time to stop and think, “How am I actually? What am I doing?”
Eliminating “busy” as your benchmark for success and accomplishment will require you to think about what it is you actually wish to achieve. This is a practice that is highly valuable. It will require you to become clear about what it is you want. Without a vision, you can’t have a plan forward.
In my experience, the people that I have seen create the most value are the ones that do the least. They focus on very few things. They become obsessed with the one thing they are proficient in and are excited about. They put all their time, money, energy, and resources into this one thing. They are able to make leaps and bounds more progress than the rest of us because they have a narrow scope of focus.
Warren Buffett famously said, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
What a novel concept, do less, achieve more.
Rather than spreading your time and energy thinly across many activities, go deep on one thing.
How To Take Huge Leaps Forward
If you’re tired of working like crazy to no avail then consider the following practices:
- Define what your vision is and what you wish to achieve. Without a clear purpose, busy will become your benchmark for success. What will that get you? Just a lot of wasted effort and few tangible results.
- Focus on bite-sized steps rather than the end goal. Breakdown your goals into manageable steps. Track the progress you make towards your goal. For example, if you wish to write a book focus on the process required to write the book: come up with an idea, outline chapters, research each chapter, write a proposal, write 5,000 words, write 10,000 words, etc.
- Stop multitasking. You can’t focus on two things at once. Your work suffers, it takes longer, and you’ll be less effective than ever.
- Stop switching between tasks. Batch similar activities into large spans of time. For example, dedicate your mornings to writing, afternoons to meetings. Better yet, consider focusing on just one thing for an entire day. Monday could be all about writing, Tuesday could be for sales calls, etc. This allows you to enter a deep and thoughtful rhythm of work.
- Stop working. We’ve become obsessed with always being on and working all the time. Sometimes life requires you to work on a weekend to get a project done, but in order to consistently produce your greatest results you need recovery days. It’s an integral part of any elite athlete’s training regimen. Without rest, peak performance is impossible.
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