Gary Keller, author of the best selling book, "The One Thing," says that multitasking slows us down and makes us slow witted. He asks the question, why would we ever tolerate multitasking when we're doing our most important work?
Welcome to Every Day a New Thought. I'm Thor Challgren. I'm taking a second look at the book by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan called The One Thing, this is a Wall Street Journal number one best seller. And he talks, obviously, about finding your one thing in life. And he makes the point that often we don't focus on that one thing because of what he calls the lies that we tell ourselves.
And in the first half of the book, he goes through those lives of the reasons why we say we can't focus on one thing. And he calls them the six lies between you and success.
In episode number 121 of my show, I talked about the fourth of the six lies that Keller cites, which is the lie that will power is always on will call. And then in episode number 122, I talked about the idea that he shares, that's also a lie, which is that everything matters equally, I'll drop the links for both of those episodes below.
Today, I want to focus on another of one of those six lies that he says stands between us and success, which is that you can effectively multitask.
So first, let's talk about what he defines as multitasking and what's not. For instance, he says if you're say, folding laundry while watching TV, that's not the kind of multitasking he's talking about. If you're doing something that doesn't matter, and you're trying to do something else with it, maybe listening to a podcast, say your favorite podcast, while you're unloading the dishwasher, that may not be fitting his definition of multitasking, what he would call multitasking,
I think from the examples that he cites in that chapter, are instances where you're trying to do something that matters to you, and then someone else comes along and interrupts you and wants you to do something else. Or maybe you're trying to do two important things at once. Like, if I was somehow trying to record this podcast episode, while thinking about the email that I'm going to write to someone else, you can see where neither one of those is going to get my full attention.
Keller says in the book that every time that we try and do two or more things at once, we're basically just dividing our focus and dumbing down all of the outcomes that we want in the process.
So he shares five ways in the book that multitasking short circuits to us. And I want to talk about those briefly here.
The first way that he says that it short circuits us is he says, essentially, there's only so much brain capability to go around. So you can divide it up as much as you want. But you're going to pay a price in time and effectiveness. So if you think that you're cramming more things in to the amount of brain power, you have, something's going to give either you're not giving it your full focus, or it's going to take you longer to do so there's only so much brain power to go around.
The second way that he says that multitasking can short circuit us is that when you spend time switching from one task to another, you may not actually get back to your original task, when you go from one and you put that on hold and you go to another, you may not go back to the same level of effectiveness that you had when you were doing the first one. Or you may not even get back to it at all, which as he points out, then results in loose ends piling up.
The third way that he says that these that multitasking can short circuit us is that when you bounce around from one activity to another, you actually lose time as your brain reorients to the new task. For instance, if you imagine you're doing task A and then you pause that your brain actually has to wind that down. And then you have to reorient yourself to the new task. And then when you finish that one, you have to wind that down and then reorient yourself to the new one. Imagine, you know if you every time you have to start up that engine of that new task and it takes time for it to get going. So when he says that, even if it's a short amount of time, we're spending more time in fact, he cites a statistic that researchers say that we lose 28% of the average work day because we're multitasking and it makes us more effective because we're spending wasting more time I'm starting up and winding down all of these extra tasks.
He also makes the point that people who sort of chronically multitask, end up having a distorted sense of how long it actually takes to do things, which, you know, when you think about it, it makes sense. If I say that I'm writing an email, and then I am trying to multitask while doing other things, like maybe I'm going to place a call, or I'm going to send a quick text, or I'm going to respond to someone's email. I'm now looking at that, that task that I was doing, and I go, Oh, writing that email, writing that long email took me an hour to do so now, in the future, when I think about writing that kind of email, I go, Well, I gotta budget an hour, because that's how long it takes. But in fact, because I was trying to multitask or while doing that actually wasted a bunch of time. So now, I think that things take me longer than they do. And so maybe I don't take on as much or I don't complete as much because I have a distorted sense of how much time something actually takes.
He also makes the final point that multitaskers make more mistakes than non multitaskers. They often make poor decisions because they favor new information over old even if the new information, older information is more valuable. So you're making more mistakes, because you're not focused on the thing that really matters to you.
And this is not to mention, the fact that people who are multitaskers end up having more stress, because if you imagine you think about your day, and you're like I'm cramming in all of this stuff, and I got to get all of this stuff done. And something where you could spend your time focused on it now is multiple things that you're trying to do at the same time.
So the takeaway for me is think about the things that are most important to you in any given day and ask yourself, are you focusing on that task and only that task? If not, maybe it's time to evaluate if multitasking is actually keeping you from being great at your one thing.
That's the show for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please hit like if you're watching on YouTube. If you're listening to the podcast, please subscribe or follow the show on your favorite podcast app. Until tomorrow. Thanks for listening
Transcribed by https://otter.ai