I don’t care what we’re being told by scientists and other credible people, I can’t do only one thing at a time. I can’t concentrate on only one thing, whether it’s by habit because there is so much to do in life or just because I really was born this way (ADD, right-brain dominant or something like this).
I don’t know about anyone else than me, but in my case, I don’t lose focus if I switch between coding a complex algorythm and my Facebook feed every five minutes. I CAN work that way, maybe it takes longer to actually finish my work, but it get finished anyway eventually. And I’m not even sure if it really slows me down to work like that, because after a few minutes of working, I just stall and can’t concentrate anymore, so I need to switch to something else for a few minutes, and come back to continue for a few minutes and so on.
You are probably asking yourself “Where the hell does he work to be able to not get fired?”. The work I’m talking about is not my job work, but my work as a writer, drawer, musician, etc, i.e. the work I do for myself and where no boss is looking over my shoulder. Unless you are your own boss or have a really open minded one, you probably won’t be able to this on your job either. Even if I practice activities that I like doing like reading, writing and drawing, I get tired of it really fast. I need to switch between it and something else to be able get something done. For example, if I’m drawing a comic, I’ll start drawing the landscape, get tired of it after a few minutes, start drawing the characters on another layer, get tired, come back to the landscape, switch to my browser to look at my Twitter feed, come back to drawing characters, etc. All of this in a 10 minutes timespan (sometimes less).
For me it is more satisfying to do multiple things at once, that way instead of having done only one big thing at the end of the day, I have done a lot of smaller tasks and parts of bigger ones. Maybe I’ve done less total work than I should have, maybe more or maybe it’s the same amount, I don’t really care, at least I’m feeling like I’m going forward.
The only way I can do only one thing at a time, is when I’m confined in some place where I can physically only do the one thing I’m there for. And even when that’s the case, I manage to find ways of doing a little of everything at once. I just can’t work linearly. For example, this week I was repairing screen windows with my father (a batch of 70 screens), the job was simple, my father had to put a new screen on each frame, and I had to cut the excess screen around each frame and then sort all frames by class number. I basically had two jobs, cut the screens, and sort frames at the very end, but instead of doing that, I cut a few screens, then sorted a few of them, then came back to cutting, then sorted a few, etc. So even for a two-step linear job I couldn’t do it the “normal” way, I had to mix it up.
What I really want to say about this is that I don’t think that we should try to force ourselves to do things the normal way if it doesn’t feel right to do so. If you are reading this and asking yourself “How can he even manage do anything this way?” then don’t mind this article, but if you understand the feeling I’m talking about, then maybe everyday you’re fighting something that doesn’t need to be fought. Like I said earlier, it will probably be impossible to do it at your job where you’re expected to be a robot that obeys orders and doesn’t think for itself, but when you’re by yourself, if your mind keeps telling you to do multi-tasking, maybe it’s because you’re meant to work this way. If I force myself to work on a task until I finish it, at some point my mind will just wander elsewhere and I’ll start being inefficient until I do what it tells me to. So I won’t be progressing on my task no matter what, whether I’ll do something else or whether I just think about it, in all cases, I’m not doing anything useful to my main task. So I better be doing the second task for a few minutes so at least I’m doing something instead of just thinking about it.
The best thing would be to alternate between two or three tasks worth of your time, so in my example about programming and looking at Facebook, if I replace Facebook by another task that gets me a useful outcome, I’m winning at two places. It allows me to take a break of a task while still progressing on another task instead of wasting my time.
Remember, I’m not taking account of time here, so if you’re in a hurry to get something done, doing two things at once will surely make you finish later than you should. But if time is not a constraint, it could be the difference between practicing an activities for 15 minutes straight and stop because you’re tired of it, or practicing it for half of an hour in three shots of 10 minutes in-between doing other chores.
I see one exception to this though, when doing sports or training, taking breaks will cancel most benefits because it won’t be hard enough on your body. If you like lifting weights then the solution is to train in super-sets.
And as a last note, think for yourself and listen to your body and mind (unless it’s telling you to do bad things). Don’t just believe what others say no matter how famous or respectable they are, because they are talking from their point of view, and you are not them. If I had believed what we are told about productivity (only concentrate on one thing at a time), I would just work the normal way like everyone else and be frustrated because I would have the impression of not doing anything with my life. So I tried something else and found out that it worked better for me. And I’m convinced that it is true for everything else in life, listen and learn from others, but make up your own mind with experience.