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Have you ever heard of the concept of “singletasking”? To understand it well, let’s refresh our thoughts on “multitasking”. Sometimes it feels like you’re drowning in the amount of work that life gives you. Every day you get a new task or something comes up that you need to add to your already busy day, and soon enough it can feel overwhelming.
A natural tendency is to start to do everything at once. Just multitask, right? Well, that might be one of the worst things you can do if you’re trying to get a job done. Multitasking is a huge myth. It’s presented as an efficient way to keep up with all the tasks you have to do, but this is just not the case. Everyone thinks they can do it, but there is a big difference between watching television while eating a sandwich and completing two real tasks at once. No one can do it well, even if they think they can, and trying to do it at all will only make you lose focus and end up performing worse at everything.
“By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.” ~ Christopher Columbus
By multitasking, the only thing that you will achieve is that you will end up continually distracting yourself because your mind is focused on too many things to process them all equally and efficiently. In fact, according to a study in the New York Times, it can take up to 25 minutes to regain focus after being distracted. That’s 25 minutes that you will waste trying to find your place and get into the right mindset again. Even if multitasking can seem like the only way forward, the truth is that it will never work.
Now here is an interesting concept of singletasking to counter multitasking. By practicing it, you will boost your efficiency & effectiveness at any task.
Singletasking
What does Singletasking mean? It means setting everything else aside and not checking, monitoring, emailing, or even touching anything other than the current task you are working on. It requires singular focus and the purposeful & intentional tuning out of everything else. Switch off your notifications and ditch your phone. If you must be on your computer, keep only one browser tab or program open at a time. A lot of singletasking is about consciously avoiding distractions that seem small and harmless. The biggest culprits? Your electronic devices. Ignore them when possible.
Keep a spotless workspace so your eye doesn’t catch something that needs cleaning or adjusting. Ideally, singletasking reduces your environment to a blank room because you shouldn’t pay attention to any of it.
For singletasking attempt to pay attention when you are being interrupted by switching between tasks. This is hard to catch at first and will require you to make conscious decisions against your instincts. Something that will be very hard to resist is to tell yourself that you must act on something immediately and interrupt your task. This is rarely the truth. To combat this urge, set aside a post-it to take notes for ideas that will inevitably spring to mind regarding other tasks. Just jot them down quickly and return to your primary goal. You can address them after your singletasking period is over, and you won’t have forgotten anything. It will keep your mind focused on one single task while setting you up for future success.
State of Flow
When you don’t multitask, you are able to reach a certain momentum and enter into a mode of truly efficient focus. We have all experienced this. It is at that moment in the middle of doing a project or assignment that we realize we are actually entirely and wholly focused on completing our task. Time has flown by and yet you are still energized and even obsessed. Distractions are no longer an issue and you find yourself powering through more work than seemed possible, and you’re doing it more efficiently than ever before because you are so deeply immersed in your task.
Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this phenomenon a state of “flow,“ which is what he deems as the most efficient mode of working possible. Csikszentmihalyi describes eight characteristics of flow—what you feel when you’re in flow, which also gives you the blueprint to achieve it on a more consistent basis.
1. Complete concentration on the task. There is no mind wandering or irrelevant thoughts interfering as you work, just complete concentration and focus. When you’re in flow, you won’t be taking a “break” every five minutes or getting up to do something else when you reach a hurdle. You’re powering through the task like there’s no tomorrow, and it is taking up all of your attention. Concentration is achieved by removing distractions, being physically ready for such a workload, and immersing yourself into a process without regard for a specific outcome.
2. Clarity of goals and immediate feedback. Sometimes it can be easy to let ourselves be overwhelmed by the work and let it blur our end goal. When you’re in flow, this is not the case. You have your reward in mind and, with every action you take, success or failure is immediately observed. You know exactly what your purpose is at every second, and this drives you. This immediate feedback helps you push toward your goal in the most direct route by making every decision and action count. Not a second goes by without feeling the feedback of progress. You have the finish line in sight and you are slowly but surely making your way there.
3. Transformation of time. There is a certain moment when you are so absorbed in your work that you are powering through something that seemed impossible at the beginning. A moment later you look up at the clock and realize several hours have passed while you were in such deep concentration. You work until 2:00 a.m. or you wake up at that time to continue working because you are consumed by these thoughts. Alternatively, you may look up and realize that even though it felt like hours of work, you finished a task in significantly less time than you thought you would. This transformation of time means that you are completely absorbed in your work and have truly reached your flow.
4. You find the experience intrinsically rewarding. Sometimes when you are doing a task, all you can think about is when you’ll finally finish and can never look at it again. But when you’re in flow, it is the task itself that you will find rewarding. Sure, you might finish a work project and know that you’ll get paid for it. But the act of finishing something that you really tried hard to complete is sometimes reward enough. The worst-case scenario, in a sense, is that you still enjoyed the process, learned something, or derived pleasure from it.
5. Effortlessness and ease. We have all experienced that moment before a task when we look at the mountain of work that awaits us and feels as if it is an impossible feat. But then we get started and build momentum, and soon enough, we are powering through the work with seemingly no effort at all. This is because momentum is one of the most important things when trying to work through a task. It is considerably easier to keep powering on than to stop for a while and then spend several moments trying to remember where you were and how to continue from there. Start small to feel a sense of victory and then let that feeling carry you through larger and larger tasks.
6. A balance between challenge and skills. When you are faced with a task that is too difficult, you will feel frustrated or discouraged. When you are faced with a task that is too easy, you will feel bored or underwhelmed. Flow is a state that is just between. It is when your skills perfectly match a task and it is enough of a challenge to keep you excited and stimulated but not overly hard that you just can’t make any progress. Overcoming something that you struggled with a little is an amazing feeling—easily finishing a task does nothing for your confidence, and being stopped cold by another task is far too discouraging.
7. The merging of actions and awareness. There comes a time when you are so immersed in a task that you feel like you don’t even need to think about your actions anymore; they just come as naturally as breathing. Your hands move as if through muscle memory, and you instinctively know what to do with each obstacle you come across. You lose the internal monologue, and instead of thinking “now I will place this item in this section,” you just do it, because your actions and awareness have completely merged into one. This is what guitarists feel like when they know a song extremely well—their fingers just move without conscious thought.
8. Finally, there is a feeling of control over the task. This isn’t to be confused with dominance over the task or a feeling of absolute authority. This is more the kind of control where you have no worries or insecurities interfering with your progress and you are fully aware of every action or decision you make and know that you are constantly getting closer to your end goal. You can foresee everything that will happen and what exactly will be needed.
So, how do you get into the state of flow? By enjoying yourself, stopping any multitasking, finding a balance between challenge and ease, and finding a way to completely immerse yourself in your work. (Excerpt is from “The Science of Powerful Focus: 23 Methods for More Productivity, More Discipline, Less Procrastination, and Less Stress” by Peter Hollins).
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