I have a friend who would always want to do everything all at once. To him, he would think he is making progress, but at the end of the day, when you take a look at his productivity, you will discover that he did not even achieve much. It looks like we live in a world that loves multitasking. When we look at the people who can answer calls, reply messages, perform calculations, prepare a report all at the same time, we may think that they are heroes. They believe that doing all these at once will save time for them. But this is actually not the case. What they fail to understand is that the human brain cannot be fully focused on two complex tasks at the same time. What people call multitasking is just their brain jumping back and forth from various tasks. But these jump may slow down the pace of the work, and may even affect productivity.
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It is not really about what you do, but how well you do them that counts. To achieve a good success, you have to learn to maximise the power of monotasking. That is, doing and completing a task before you jump over to the next one. Imagine a driver driving down the road, but every two minutes, the driver will hit the brakes just to look at the map, or to look at the back seat, or to reply an email, the journey will take a very long time. This is also what happens when you multitask where you need undivided focus. Everytime you leave the main work to do other side tasks, you are shifting your focus. And when you go back to your main work, your brain will have to do an extra work to remember where you stopped, reconnect your focus, and the proceed with the task. But then, you would have even lost the time that you thought you wanted to gain.
There is what is called "attention residue." This is simply a leftover from the task that you were doing before you switch over to the next one. Which means that when you are doing a main task, and then you suddenly decide to switch over to another task, a remnant from the former task will still be stuck in your brain. So instead of fully focusing on the new one, some parts of your attention will be stuck at the old one. Now imagine what happens when you hop between various tasks in a short period of time, what do you think will happen to your attention? When the attention is heavily divided, it will also affect productivity.
You have to understand that when you focus on one thing at a time and give it your undivided attention, you will work better with fewer mistakes. When I was in secondary school many years back, we did a small practical. Two groups were given two convex lenses. They were asked to move out into the sun and then focus the lens on a paper. One group was asked to constantly shift the lens around. After a few minutes, the first group was able to generate so much heat from their lens, that it started a fire on a paper. While the second group could not achieve it, because they constantly moved the lens around. You see, when you maintain focus on one thing per time, it improves your productivity, and will make you to achieve a better result.
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Switching to monotasking may not be that easy because the world is full of a lot of distractions. This is why you have to guard your attention well. For example, if you have a report to write, you can close other tabs on your computer to avoid distractions. Or pick a particular task, and set a timer for it. This will help you to maintain focus. Even when a thought or an idea pops up in your mind, what you can do is to write it down on a paper, then continue with the task you are doing. This is so that it will not distract you when you want to combine the thoughts with the task you are doing.
It is also worthy to note that monotasking brings a level of peace of mind. Multitasking can keep someone's mind in a state of panic, which can make the person think that they are always rushing but never arriving. But monotasking gives you the control you need. It also makes you to enjoy what you are doing, because you will be seeing the progress as you move, and you will also be more at peace. I conclude with an advice a friend once gave; "do not do everything at once. Just focus on one per time, do it well, get it done, and move to the next task."
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