Multikills: How to Do More With Less

More than just stoning birds

Published in

The Data Entrepreneurs

3 min readDec 6, 2021

How can you get more out of your time? A first thought might be multitasking. If I can do two things at once, I’ll double my productivity! Although this may seem appealing, it is not a good strategy for many reasons (discussed later). Rather, we can seek guidance from our bird-hating ancestors and try to “kill two birds with one stone”. Despite their apparent overlap, multitasking and this guidance are different. Here, I will discuss their differences and why the latter is a good solution to our initial question.

Multitasking

A fundamental problem for anyone trying to be productive is getting the most out of your limited time and resources. Some will try multitasking. This might work for small things, like listening to an audiobook while driving, but it can quickly get away from you, like trying to do your taxes while cooking dinner.

Ultimately, multitasking makes it hard for your brain to learn new things. Thus, multitasking doesn’t scale. However, there is a related idea that may help.

There is an old saying about “killing two birds with one stone”. At first glance, this may sound like multitasking, but it is not.

Multitasking is doing two things at the same(-ish) time. However, “killing two birds with one stone” is a little different. It’s a single effort (stone), resulting in two outcomes (dead birds). Sorry birdies.

When you think about it, you really only stand to save time when multitasking (and even that is debatable). Conversely, “killing two birds with one stone” not only saves time, it saves effort, resources, attention, and money, and ultimately allows you to focus on a single task. When you can focus, you can learn new skills. Thus, this strategy doesn’t force you to sacrifice your development in the pursuit of “efficiency”.

Multikills

In the spirit of stoning birds, let us generalize and compress this idea of “killing two birds with one stone” to a single word, multikill. A multikill is a single effort that results in multiple desired outcomes.

People do this stuff all the time. Some examples are:

Getting a new job to both grow and get an income
Exercising for health benefits and as a hobby
Reading before bed as a sleep aide and learning something new
Doing dishes to tidy up and as a mental break
Buying a house to have somewhere to live and a long-term investment

Multikills amplify productivity. Unlike multitasking, they are a scalable way to get more out of your time, resources, and brain. Don’t multitask, multikill.

Keep up with The Data Entrepreneurs:

👉 Join the Discord | 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube | 📅 Events Calendar