There is a common belief that you can do multiple things at once and be more productive. The problem is that your brain can not focus on more than one thing at once, unless they are tasks that require very little thinking. For instance you can chew gum while you work, however your brain can not simultaneously focus on multiple complex tasks at the same time. Instead your brain must switch its attention from one thing to another, and every time you do this your brain undergoes a process that takes a fractions of a second or more.
According to the book Brain Rules by John Medina
Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on sequentially, one at a time. This attentional ability is not capable of multitasking…To put it bluntly. Research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention rich inputs simultaneously.
Every time you switch tasks, your brain must undergo a specific process called rule activation. When your brain wants to start a new task, your anterior prefrontal cortex activates and sends out a two part message. The two parts include a search query to find the neurons responsible for doing the task, and a command to arouse the specific neurons once discovered. When you need to switch your attention to something else your brain must disengage from the current task, then activate the anterior prefrontal cortex, which sends out a new message to find the neurons you need for the next task and activate them. This process takes several tenths of a second.
“Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more errors.” -Brain Rules
Some evidence that shows how bad we are at multitasking is the awful driving performance of people who drive while talking on their cell phone.
According to Brain Rules “Cellphone talkers are a half second slower to hit the brakes in emergencies, slower to return to normal speed after an emergency, and more wild in their following distance behind the vehicle in front of them. In a half second a driver going 70 miles per hour travels 51 feet…50% of the visual cues spotted by attentive drivers are missed by cell phone talkers…they get in more wrecks than anyone except very drunk drivers.”
So if you are serious about getting more done, turn off the email alerts and close your email, close the internet browser windows you are not using, and limit unscheduled co-worker interruptions. You’ll be more productive and probably less stressed by not trying to do a million things at once.
The 2 minute rule is a really easy way to simplify prioritizing tasks from David Allen’s getting things done. If there is something that you need to get done that will take 2 minutes or less to do, get it done first. This will shorten your to do list and prevent you from wasting mental effort thinking about it later. David Allen says in GTD that our brains are often reminding us that we have to do things at the precise moment that you can’t do anything about it. By sending that thank you letter first, you have to spend time thinking about it later, especially when you are driving on the freeway or at a meeting.
A smart way to get more things done is to delegate lower level tasks. That’s where a virtual assistant can be a tremendous asset. Written about in books such as The World is Flat and The 4 Hour Work Week, a remote virtual assistant from firms like Brickwork will take care of numerous time consuming tasks that can free up your time to do things that are more important to you. From a business approach, virtual assistants can do data entry, sales support, calendar management, and other administrative tasks. But they can also help with personal tasks such as booking dinner reservations, managing your email inbox, or even calling your spouse as was highlighted in the 4 Hour Work Week. When you can delegate tasks like finding a dentist you also conserve brain power because you don’t have to think about it or remind yourself to do it.
Remote virtual assistants are very affordable. Indian companies like Tasks EveryDay advertise services for as low as $6.98 per hour. Unless your time is worth less than $7 an hour, it is a no brainer. If your time is worth $100 an hour, you are saving about $93 by not finding a dentist yourself.
Some of the negatives of a remote virtual assistant from India can be difficulty communicating or misunderstandings. In the 4 Hour Workweek they give an example of a virtual assistant who wasted a lot of time on the clock because they didn’t understand what the client wanted. Therefore it is important to make sure that you are on the same page and you check the status of longer projects to ensure the VA is using time wisely.
However, I think the pros outnumber the cons, and even if you don’t need a VA right now it is good to get some experience managing a VA for when you do need one. If you are a busy executive, just think of the things that a VA can free you up to do.
This post is about the principles of time management that underlie the book Do It Tomorrow by Mark Forster:
Have a clear vision
Have a clear vision of your goals, of the things you want to do and the things you don’t want to do. A clear vision directs your priorities. Setting priorities is only meaningful between projects, not between tasks that have to be done anyway (’project’ is loosely defined here as an activity that leads to some desired result and that cannot be finished in one go).
Your vision is not something static: it will change over time. So frequently revisit your vision, to keep your priorities clear as well.
One thing at a time
Focus, focus, focus! Use for example timeboxing or working with a pair (like pairprogramming) to work in highly focused way. Don’t dilute your focus by having too many projects at the same time.
Little and often
Work on things frequently, in small bits, iteratively and increment, so that results grow over time. If you want e.g. to write a book or finish a Ph.D. thesis, work every day on it. Actually doing something and keep doing it is more important than the amount of time spent.
This works for writing, uncluttering your home or office, bookkeeping, and many other larger activities.
Define your limits
Creative thinking works better within clear boundaries. An example of limits is timeboxing your activities, e.g. using the pomodori technique.
Defining limits is also important for your projects: determine the boundaries (and frequently re-determine them) to get a clear focus of what you’re doing and what you aren’t doing, instead of being busy with a cloud of all kinds of vaguely interesting and possibly relevant stuff.
This week, I’ve started to make a map of all the projects that I currently have and that I want to take on this year. Being an independent consultant, I don’t have an organisational context that sets a lot of boundaries for me so I’ll have to set them myself in order to be effective.
Closed lists
A closed list is a list that has a line under it and that will not change. For every day, you make a Will Do list, a closed list with the stuff that came in the previous day and your recurring tasks. As the list is closed, it will only shrink when you’re finishing items from the list. This will give you a feeling of accomplishment at the end of each day, when all the Will Do items have been checked.
Anything that comes in during the day and that is not a real urgency, will be put on tomorrow’s list or below the line of today’s list. You’ll first finish all the items above the line, before doing the newly added things.
This approach enables you to plan most of the work you do, so you can work much less reactively and much less governed by self-inflicted urgencies. Your day to day planning will become more predictable and you’ll get early feedback when you’re structurally overloaded.
The Will Do list is limited by your daily processing capacity (so you will need to find out what it is), so you prevent backlogs from building up. If you get more work each day than you can handle the next day, you’ll have to either cut down on your commitments, make your systems more efficient, and/or allocate more time for the stuff on your lists.
Willem asked, what do you do when the telephone rings? It depends: you can answer the call, make a note, and take action tomorrow (unless, of course, it’s about your house being on fire). You can also decide that you won’t answer the phone during certain activities, listen voicemail later on, and get back to the callers the next day. It depends on the nature of your work and your preferences.
Another advantage of closed lists is that you don’t have to prioritise between the items. They all need to be done and if the list is limited by your daily processing capacity, it will be finished. Prioritizing doesn’t make sense for stuff that needs to be done anyway.
Working this way gives peace of mind and reduces waste: you don’t have to spend your energy making difficult decisions about priorities. Prioritizing is waste: it’s work that adds no value, but just increases the pressure on you! You’ll have more time and energy left for actually doing useful stuff.
Forster’s recommendation is to start with the least urgent things first. If work has to be done anyway, why not do it right away?
A bright, grand idea like writing a book is not something you can finish the next day. This becomes a project, a task that recurs (a little attention every day) until the work is finished.
Reducing random factors
By preventing most ‘urgencies’, you will reduce a lot of (self-inflicted) variability in your day to day work. Closed lists system make the underlying systems problems visible. You can’t eliminate all variability and randomness, but you can reduce them substantially, giving you more freedom, making sure your important things get done, and enabling you to handle the remaining randomness better.
Commitment vs interest
You can be interested in a lot of things, but you can have only a limited amount of commitments. It is important to know your commitments, as these provide a framework for your decisions. It’s like the pigs and chickens metaphor used in Scrum (chickens are only involved, but pigs are committed). A pig only has limited ham and bacon it can provide… (the pigs and chickens metaphor has its limitations, but that’s another story)
Merlin Mann is an expert on productivity and speaks about how to think about time management.
Have you asked yourself recently if your time is going toward things that matter and bring value to your life? Merlin suggests that we should be examining how we are spending our time and questioning our decisions on how we allocate the fixed 168 hours we have each week. To save you 35 minutes, I have summarized some of the key takeaways from Merlin’s presentation.
An interesting concept he talks about is that when we don’t understand how valuable our time is, we are more likely to allow it to be wasted on unimportant things. For instance if someone asks you for a hundred dollars you will probably question it, but people often don’t question when someone asks you to attend an hour long meeting.
Merlin also says we should question the defaults in life, like why is it that when you schedule a meeting in a calendar app like Google Calendar, the default is 1 hour?
He also suggested to view the time you have in a week as a box: you don’t want to allow stupid things into the box. Also we should be careful about what things we allow to fall into your life. This means thinking before you say yes to a commitment. We should be able to decide who has access to your time and when. A team should share their email culture to save each other time, such as agreeing on a signal for when an email is not time sensitive or even designating a certain time of the day when team members should not expect a response to emails.
Merlin highlights the importance of renegotiation, which he borrowed from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Tweaking a project for instance can mean the difference between dreading working on it or being engaged and behind it 100%.
If you struggle to keep your inbox clean and free of unread items, consider yourself one of many. With Gmail growing 43 percent in users and visits last year alone, Google developers were smart to help users stay organized by developing a “send and archive” feature allowing users to archive items immediately after sending them. Inboxes shrink, productivity increases. Brilliant.
Adam Ostrow of Mashable explains further, “Yet another new feature in Gmail Labs to report: a “send and archive” button, that, when enabled (from the “Labs” page under “Settings”), allows you to reply to a thread and have it immediately archived.
Like all archived messages, these threads will still be available in the “All Mail” folder of Gmail, which also includes labeled messages that you filter out of the Inbox.”
Visit the article on Mashable here to continue reading.
It is not hard for executives to spend a lot of time on unimportant tasks if they don’t track where their time is going. One simple way to find out where time is going is by keeping a time journal to record exactly how your time is being allocated. Once you have enough data, you can analyze how your time is being allocated, and figure out what tasks are consuming excess amounts of your valuable time.
Tracy Carter writes on suite101.com that “You should maintain a time journal for one week if you have a somewhat routine schedule and for two weeks if your schedule is less predictable such as the schedule of a courier, performer, freelancer, or independent contractor.”
Once you have this data, it makes it easier to allocate time toward tasks that will maximize your productivity in reaching your high level goals. You can also eliminate tasks that are chronic time wasters such as watching television. It is good to question whether activities that you are in the habit of following are worth doing.
Time Tracker is a good application to track how much time you spend on tasks.
The late Randy Pausch’s presentation on time management is one that every executive should see to improve their management of our most important scarce resource. Pausch points out that most people don’t equate time to money, but it is simple to get a fairly accurate idea of what an hour of your time is worth. If you are spending your time on low value activities, then you are not maximizing the use of time. An important tidbit of advice is to allocate more time to activities that help accomplish urgent and important goals, though a lot of people spend too much time on non-urgent unimportant goals. That’s probably part of the reason the typical office worker wastes 2 hours a day. Learn more by checking out this great lecture.
Randy Pausch’s Top Time Management Tips
1. Do the ugliest thing first.
2. Focus on the important urgent tasks.
3. Think about time in terms of money.
4. A filing system is essential.
5. Use multiple computer monitors.
6. Have some system to know where you have to be when (it saves brain power).
7. Get a speaker phone for your desk.
8. Stand during phone calls.
9. Start by announcing goals for the call.
10. Call people right before lunch or right before the end of the day.
11. Learn to say no.
12. Find your creative/productive time and defend it ruthlessly.
13. Find your dead time.
14. Turn phone calls into email.
15. Monitor where your time is going. Keep a time journal.
16. Make up a fake deadline and act like it’s real.
17. Empower those to whom you delegate.
18. When you delegate, do the ugliest job yourself.
19. Treat your secretary well.
20. Give people objectives, not procedures.
21. Have someone record what was decided at the meeting and who will do what when.
22. Take away everyone’s Blackberrys.
23. Require meetings to have an agenda.
24. Don’t delete emails.
25. If you want something done, don’t send it to 5 people.
