Don't Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time - By: Bradley Hess

How can walking and chewing gum be dangerous you ask? Let me back up a bit and explain my point. I have had many meetings with individuals where either they or I were engaging in this dangerous activity. Ok, so we were not literally walking and chewing gum, but we were attempting to multi-task. I am here to propose that you can't multi-task; you only have the ability to focus on one activity at a time effectively. I know many of you are going to say, "No way! I can do multiple things all of the time; I text and drive, I talk on the phone and do the dishes, I...". It has been proven that texting and driving is dangerous, so I will not spend to much time on this one; however, just because you can pull it off does not mean that you did it well. Your driving and your texting ability went way down; you could not have performed any difficult driving maneuver and at the same time text accurately or quickly.

Must of us have accepted the fact that we cannot or should not text and drive for safety reasons, however think about this same concept in a different application. How many times have you been on the phone with someone and worked on your email at the same time? How many times have you been in a conference call meeting and read through someone's blog post? Caught ya! When you take the time away from a meeting for a moment to read through your email, you have just become less effective in your meeting by not giving the meeting your full attention. Now you respond to the email, however you are still somewhat mentally in the meeting. Therefore at this time you are performing two activities each with less than full attention and completing both of them most likely with poor quality. Similar to the example of texting and driving, you may be able to pull it off, but you will have done both with less then stellar performance.

I have blogged before about the importance of mental focus and I ask you to go back and read my earlier blog post about the subject. Mental focus can help you get the task at hand done much more efficiently and quickly. Teach yourself to stay on task until that task has been completed. There are many different ways of doing this; the one that I like is using a planner or a task sheet. This allows you to see at a glance what needs to be done and you can check each task off the list when it has been completed. You do not need to worry about ten things at once. Just focus on the most important task at hand and get it done. I recently read the book from Brian Tracy called, "Eat That Frog", where talks about getting the most difficult task done first, don't put it off. Eat that frog and eat it first thing.

About the Author

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