If you’re like me, you can’t stay focused on something for more than a few minutes, and it can become quite hard to get things done. I found a way to be able to keep working without having to take breaks every 15 minutes (or every 5 minutes for some tasks). And this is what I call “task pairing”.
The name should be speaking for itself, it’s about doing tasks in pairs. More precisely, alterning between two tasks on relatively short intervals of time.
Here’s a real-life example to illustrate it:
Let’s say that it’s saturday afternoon and I’m thinking about what I would like to get done before supper. I would like to read a chapter of a book, draw a comic, update my website and study for an upcoming test. In my case, writing and drawing for too long give me funny feelings in my hand, so I try to not overuse the same body parts in my pairings. So if my study method requires me to write things, I won’t pair it with drawing. And if studying requires some reading, which is probably the case, I won’t pair it with book reading either, or else the pairing will lose its meaning.
So if you catch my drift here, a good pairing is about doing two things that are not related, that don’t use the same habilities/senses and that use different body parts, whenever possible. The goal here is to alternate between two tasks that are different enough to eliminate boredom. In the case of the example above, I’ll choose to pair “Reading a book” with “Drawing a comic” and pair “Updating my website” with “Studying for my test”.
Now that my pairing is decided, all I have to do is to start doing those tasks. My personal way is to switch between the two tasks everytime I start to lose focus, which amounts to approximately every 5-10 minutes. So in short, it can look like this: 9 minutes of reading a book, 7 minutes of drawing, 12 minutes of reading a book, 6 minutes of drawing, and so on. Then when I consider that I’ve done enough reading and drawing, I’ll do the same thing with the “Update my website” and “Study for my test” pair.
By using this method I feel “fresh” while accomplishing my tasks and my overall work time is greater, which isn’t the case if I try to do the same activity for a whole hour without break. The time interval doesn’t have to be random, you can adjust it to something that fits your liking or depending on the nature of your tasks, like a fixed time of 15 minutes for each task for example. But if you come to the point where you switch after more than half an hour between tasks, I don’t think that the effect will be noticeable and you probably don’t have much attention deficit.