Read This If You Do One Thing At A Time
Those of you who have been readers for the past couple years know my feelings about "multi-tasking."
There is plenty of evidence that doing multiple things at once means you don't do any of them well. That's fine if the tasks are small and the consequences of failure are low-risk.
You might not need to hit 6-Sigma level industry standards if you're just folding pizza boxes or sealing envelopes.
For everything else, though, it's usually worth it to just focus on one thing at a time.
But that's not good enough!
I want to do all the things!
I want to be productive while I sleep!
Me too.
So, how do we do multiple things at once, without actually doing multiple things at once?
Okay, brace yourselves for this super boring, unsexy, nerd answer:
Do stuff that compounds or does double-duty for you.
Yep.
Building tools and systems are one way to achieve this.
They allow us to apply the same effort and get way better leverage.
The bicycle is a perfect example. A bicycle might take days or weeks to make--or it might take a chunk of cash to buy--but once you've got one, you can move literally 3 - 10 times faster than pedestrians.
Same effort. Way better output.
Make your work do double-duty.
The next level is thinking about how you can then turn that same energy you're putting into the bicycle into something else that's useful to you, like exercise, or eliminating your carbon emissions.
Now you're not only going faster, but you're increasing your heart rate and burning carbohydrates, not hydrocarbons! Cool!
- If you're a marketer, this might mean taking that YouTube interview you did and turning it into a podcast or quick checklist for your audience.
- If you're a teacher, this might mean using your garden to teach biology, chemistry, and cooking skills in the same lesson.
- If you're a software engineer, this might mean using code you've already built and either refactoring it to use less CPU or just updating some parameters to make it solve a new problem.
Multi-tasking is out.
Single-tasking on work that does double-duty is in!
If you keep chasing more work I promise that's what you'll get.
But if you look for more ways to put the wind at your back you'll get more done and you'll still have time left over.
Prefer to work on things that provide multiple benefits.
2 Minute Action:
Check-in with your partner, co-founder, teammate, or your own personal to-do list.
Look at all the work you're doing and call out some areas of focus (marketing, operations, finance).
Create a Venn diagram, triangle, or whatever you need to create to visualize the overlap between those areas of focus.
You might not magically come up with ideas immediately and that's okay, but put a post-it note or reminder of this diagram somewhere you'll see it.
I've found that when the question keeps knocking on my door, I start to see answers in my day-to-day that I might not have seen before.
How To Actually Do Less Stuff And Get More Done
Productivity is not about doing more work.
It’s not about turning gears faster in a gearbox.And it’s not about the hours you put in.
In fact, it’s just the opposite.
It’s about figuring out how to do less work.It’s about shifting gears to apply better leverage.It’s about reducing the time and resources required to get the job done by deadline.
2 Minute Action
Where do you spend 80% of your day or effort?What causes 80% of the headaches, pain points, or dollar drainage?If you can take 2 minutes to identify it, you can measure it.If you can measure it, you can alleviate it.Don’t try to fix everything at once, just focus on one big problem at a time.
A Little Known Shortcut To Instantly Increasing Efficiency
You're not going to like this one.It's one of those "simple but not easy" idioms.
If you want to increase your efficiency or productivity:
Delete most of your tasks. I get that this is a bit of a clickbait-y headline, but stick with me.It's important to focus on what matters.Email is everyone else's to-do list for you--so don't start your day with that.Phone calls feel urgent, but if it's important enough to pick up, they'll call you again.Meetings can either be delivered as an email or scheduled as a phone call instead. If you absolutely HAVE to go to meeting try standing up. We tend to get straight to the point when we're standing instead of sitting.You get the point.What else do you NOT have to do, today?
2 Minute Action:
Check your to-do list and run through it with this question in mind:What would happen if it didn't get done? How bad are the consequences?Just remember that every item on that list should fight for its life to stay there.Delete a few excess tasks every day and then multiply that by a lifetime?Now we're talking.