Apologies to my faithful readers. I’ve been quite busy! But in my business, I found that my brain was cluttered.
I also found my phone was cluttered, to the point where it was having a hard time keeping up with everything I wanted it to do. And that’s when I realized: I was trying to do too much stuff at one time.
I’m always thinking of some project or another I want to get done. I even have time to do most of them! But my downfall is that I attempt to do too many at once, thinking I can cram more in if I multi-task.
And I really, really stink at multi-tasking.
I’m also realizing that with unlimited time to get things done, I don’t want to get so busy that I can’t enjoy the time I have at home while it lasts. This, too, is difficult.
I don’t really have control over as many things as I’d like. But every now and then, I can do something with my time and make it count.
Blogging isn’t something that I really make a lot of money with, but that’s because I haven’t made it a major priority up to this point. It’s not that I couldn’t… but till now, I’ve been up to my ears with other, more important things to do.
And so I came to understand my limitation through my phone. Even it couldn’t keep up with my brain’s multi-tasking. And the only way to be able to focus is to simplify your tasks to where you can get each one done, mostly sequentially. My brain works best by focusing on one thing at a time, and research shows that most people’s brains are bad at multitasking, too.
Do you want to get more done? Simplify. Cut things down until you can accomplish what you need to get done. Then add more as you get more done- not all at once.
Did you know computers don’t multi-task well? It’s true. They can only follow one instruction at a time. Granted, they can switch tasks thousands of times a second- but make no mistake, each processor (using modern x86 architecture) can only execute a single instruction at a time.
I find that when I multitask, I get a lot of things partially finished- which means I don’t finish anything.
Starting now, I’m going to work on simplifying my task queue only to things I can get done immediately- this is my “NOW” task list. Everything else goes into a “Later” task list.
The hardest part for me is deciding what goes into which list. With a little practice, I can figure it out. So can you.