Best Single-Tasking Tips for Agile & Non-Agile Professionals
Story taken from the nTask Blog — 3 Best Single-Tasking Tips for Agile & Non-Agile Professionals
People around the world are experiencing an increasing number of tasks plastered on their daily agenda and no solution on how to complete them in the desired time frame.
Nowadays, no one can say that they are concentrating on just one thing at a time, throughout the entirety of their day. Why? Well, we have all bought into the myth that is Multitasking.
Multitasking nowadays is considered to be a trending strategy to complete your mountain of tasks, but what it actually does is that it helps to switch your brain from one task to another.
This is why, we are going to talk about single-tasking and how you can incorporate this strategy in your professional and personal life to get your daily activities done, without them being piled and piled on top of you.
What is Single-tasking?
Single-tasking is the strategy to keep focussed on a single task to be performed at a time. This strategy is amazing because it helps you to get tasks done quickly and has a higher success rate of getting higher quality infused in the tasks you perform than when you perform multiple tasks at once.
Why is Single tasking So Damn Important?
As we now know about what single tasking is, let’s talk about why is it so important and what is it a solution for.
To learn the true importance of single-tasking, we turn our focus towards the people, pressures, and processes included in our daily personal and professional lives.
As an average person with personal and professional responsibilities, you are someone who probably gets overwhelmed with the mountain of tasks and other activities in their life, and the bad news for us lot is that a study shows that only 5% of us finish our task on time, daily.
This means that the way we are approaching these tasks and activities has to be changed because obviously, it is not effective enough. Generally, this “way” for most of us is multitasking. Why are we saying that?
Well, most of the people that we read about online, said that the biggest challenges that they face daily while performing their tasks are:
- Not having a clear set of priorities mapped out for the day
- Always have a lot of stuff to do
- Procrastinating all day by spending way too much time chatting and checking emails
Although it’s not spelled out, all three of these challenges point to being the essential elements of multitasking.
Many of us believe in this myth that multitasking is the one thing that is going to help them achieve success in all of the tasks and activities that they have to perform daily, but little do they know that the one thing that they are relying on, is the one thing standing in their way to success.
By looking at these points, we see that multitasking creates a sort of vortex from which the average professional is hardly going to escape out of, which brings us to our next point, how to break the cycle of multitasking and understanding the true benefits of Single-tasking.
Breaking the Cycle and Understanding Single-tasking
Let’s take a look at the 4 amazing benefits of single-tasking that can help us to break the cycle of multitasking.
1. Lowering Your Stress Levels
One of the best benefits of single-tasking is that it helps you lower your stress levels and make sure that you’re calmer and patient to take on the challenges that you are faced with.
This is because multitasking, no matter what anyone else says, sucks up a lot of your energy and it has many compounding effects that don’t help the peace and zen peace of mind that you were hoping for.
This is why, single-tasking is perfect for you if you want to peacefully complete your work one task at a time because if you force yourself to work on everything at once, you are going to fall behind and stress yourself out.
2. Helps You To Be More Creative
Believe it or not, Single-tasking can help you be more creative. How does that happen when you are working on a single task at a time without variations or use of creativity?
Well, if you are considering creativity to be working on different tasks, but using the same procedure, then you are sadly mistaken about what creativity is.
Using single-tasking, you can dive deeper into every task that you are performing and you can find different paths, options, and results about those activities that nobody had ever found before you. And when you are going deep, you are being creative and that’s what is beneficial for your work in the long run.
3. Single Tasking Helps To Rebuild Focus
Another great benefit of single tasking is that it helps you rebuild your focus and helps you to make sure that you don’t procrastinate on the tasks that you have to perform.
Most of us have a lot of different web pages open in our browser throughout the day. Even if we say that the total web pages are 200, the actual webpages that are helpful to our work would be 2 or 3.
We know that this is not a perfect example, but the point still stands that with single tasking, you can easily get rid of those extra 197 pages and focus entirely on your work.
4. Getting More Work Done
Last and the most important benefit of single tasking is that you can get a lot more work done in the same amount of time you would’ve spent trying to complete many different tasks through multitasking.
One fact to prove that statement is that through single-tasking you get into a state called “Flow”. What this state represents is that it allows you to immerse in your work and keep the focus on it rather than anything else around you.
This state is more than 500% more productive than your multitasking strategies, and to us, that is the most important benefit of single tasking there is.
So, we know what is single-tasking and we know how important it is, but if you are a victim of multitasking and you don’t know how you can change your ways, here are the three steps which you can use to incorporate single-tasking into your life.
3-Step Guide to Single-tasking
Here are the three steps that you can use to incorporate single-tasking in your life.
- Getting rid of distractions
- Start small, but time yourself
- Take meaningful breaks between working sessions
Let’s take a look at all of them in detail.
1. Getting Rid of Distractions
The first step that you have to take to incorporate single-tasking in your life is to make sure that you get rid of all of the distractions around you.
These distractions include any extra tabs open in your browser to having your phone even in your presence while you work. Anything that is not needed for you to work has to go.
2. Start Small, But Time Yourself
You are starting to incorporate single-tasking in your life, so no one is expecting you to go from a distracted multitasker to a non-stop productive professional in a single day.
Everything takes time. And that’s why the next step in this list is that you should start small. It can even be 5 minutes a day when you are completely distraction-free. If you are not sure that you can survive even 5 minutes, in the beginning, don’t worry use a timer.
Why a timer? Well, if you can’t survive 5 minutes in the beginning, how do you expect to work on hours on end without being distracted? That’s why when you start single-tasking, you should keep a timer on you so that you can time your distractions and try to reduce them slowly but continuously.
3. Take Meaningful Breaks Between Working Sessions
The last but not the least step is to take meaningful breaks between your working sessions throughout the whole day. This is because single-tasking takes a toll on you and if you don’t rest your mind and your body, you are never going to achieve the success you desire.
The best step to do that is to completely change your environment for the break. If you work in an office space or an enclosed space, go to the park and feel the openness. This will help you relax and fresh for the challenges that you will eventually go back to tackle.
Conclusion
This was a short guide to single-tasking and how you can incorporate it into your life in 2021. If you think that we missed something or if you think that we have mentioned something incorrectly, then contact us and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
More resources you may like:
Originally published at https://www.ntaskmanager.com on March 11, 2021.
