Enhancing Multi-task Effectively
Hannah Kowalczyk-Harper, author of How to be Influential: Easy Actions to Increase Persuasion believed that “while going back and forth between tasks wastes time and energy, there are still many activities that, when done together, can improve your use of time.” (2016)
I absolutely agree with Hannah that multi-tasking effectively is how we make of it. It is known that we as humans have a very short attention span and are easily distracted. If we were to organize our thoughts and plan out how we want to multi-task, we will definitely be able to work more practically and methodically.
She believed that activities that do not require all our attention such as listening to music and audio books or walking can be done while incorporating other activities. Other activities that can be done in autopilot or requires constant wait time can also be put to the side while we work on something else that would require our immediate attention.
In general, Hannah believed that multi-tasking is definitely something that can be done and included into our daily lives in a healthy way. We can be taking advantage of those extra minutes in between tasks and utilize them to do a short chore or prioritizing while multi-tasking on what to focus more on.
Multi-tasking is something as simple as drinking water and listening to music at the same time. Often times, people assume the term multi-tasking to go in the direction of doing a bunch of complicated tasks at the same time such as working on an essay and reading a book. However, if we were to multi-task correctly by orderly combining harder tasks and easier tasks together, we will be able to use our time much more efficiently.
Source: Hannah K.H. (2016, March). Yes, You Can Multitask: Here’s How. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@MsHannahTweets/yes-you-can-multitask-here-s-how-5fc7c0fc120b
Recently, I have been practicing on how to improve my multi-tasking skills by doing homework and watching movies at the same time. The results weren’t bad because both activities do not require the same constant attention. For homework, I mostly focus on thinking and processing and watching what I’m doing while for movies, I mostly focus on listening to what they are saying. I think I have improved because I use to only be able to understand the movie if it was Chinese since it is my first language, but nowadays I can also understand it even if it was in English. Next time, I will practice this skill by adding another smaller task such as playing a phone game while doing homework and watching movies.
