Description

Multitasking is not a Thing but Focus Is ….

3 Ways to Achieve It!

Excerpt from Gary Keller’s

(The One Thing)

Multitasking is a lie. It’s a lie because nearly everyone accepts it as an effective thing to do. It’s become so mainstream that people actually think it’s something they should do, and do as often as possible. We not only hear talk about doing it, we even hear talk about getting better at it. More than six million webpages offer answers on how to do it, and career websites list “multitasking” as a skill for employers to target and for prospective hires to list as a strength. Some have gone so far as to be proud of their supposed skill and have adopted it as a way of life. But it’s actually a “way of lie,” for the truth is multitasking is neither efficient nor effective. In the world of results, it will fail you every time.

“Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.” —Steve Uzzell

MONKEY MIND

The concept of humans doing more than one thing at a time has been studied by psychologists since the 1920s, but the term “multitasking” didn’t arrive on the scene until the 1960s. It was used to describe computers, not people. Back then, ten megahertz was apparently so mind-bogglingly fast that a whole new word was needed to describe a computer’s ability to quickly perform many tasks. In retrospect, they probably made a poor choice, for the expression “multitasking” is inherently deceptive. Multitasking is about multiple tasks alternately sharing one resource (the CPU), but in time the context was flipped and it became interpreted to mean multiple tasks being done simultaneously by one resource (a person). It was a clever turn of phrase that’s misleading, for even computers can process only one piece of code at a time. When they “multitask,” they switch back and forth, alternating their attention until both tasks are done. The speed with which computers tackle multiple tasks feeds the illusion that everything happens at the same time, so comparing computers to humans can be confusing.

Now that you’ve had a history lesson…

Let’s talk about (3) Ways to Show Up Laser Focused!

Ask yourself Focusing question three times a day…

“What’s the ONE Thing I can do / such that by doing it / everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

1. “WHAT’S THE ONE THING I CAN DO... This sparks focused action. “What’s the ONE Thing” tells you the answer will be one thing versus many. It forces you toward something specific. It tells you right up front that, although you may consider many options, you need to take this seriously because you don’t get two, three, four, or more.
2. “...SUCH THAT BY DOING IT” This tells you there’s a criterion your answer must meet. It’s the bridge between just doing something and doing something for a specific purpose. “Such that by doing it” lets you know you’re going to have to dig deep, because when you do this ONE Thing, something else is going to happen.
3. “EVERYTHING ELSE WILL BE EASIER OR UNNECESSARY?” Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and I could move the world,” and that’s exactly what this last part tells you to find. “Everything else will be easier or unnecessary” is the ultimate leverage test. It tells you when you’ve found the first domino. It says that when you do this ONE Thing, everything else you could do to accomplish your goal will now be either doable with less effort or no longer even necessary.

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