Multitasking hurts productivity. Focus on the biggest projects

I’m four years old. Coat, gloves, and hat on. It’s early spring. I’m watching and trying to help my dad in the garden. Among other things, he grew cabbages. He’s moaning because there are holes: “bloody butterflies, eating my flaming cabbages”.

Instead of eating the whole cabbage, the cabbage whites would fly around taking nibbles, leaving the whole cabbage patch full of holes.

This is what we do at work. Unfocused, yet busy, creating lots of holes and not doing one big thing. We move from reading a pdf to seeing an email notification, to instant messaging a colleague and then picking up the phone.

Task switching is mentally consuming and costly to our productivity. It’s easy to be busy, but much harder to make a difference – and making a difference involves working on the big and horrible stuff we’ve been putting off. In his book Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy tells us that if we can get the big thing (the frog) done and out of the way, we’ll have a much better rest of our day. It’s the big things that make the difference.

Author Zig Ziglar said: “I don’t care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don’t harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there, you’re never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants.”

There are three keys to achieving focus:

1. Stop multitasking (stop being a cabbage butterfly).
2. Get rid of distractions.
3. Identify the tasks that will make the biggest difference, and do them.

We’ve talked about the first point. For number two, get rid of email notifications. The four-minute badger is the metaphor that will help you stop: imagine driving, and a badger steps out in front of you every four minutes. Would that have an impact on your driving performance? Yes. Turn off your email notifications or, if you have to, only turn it on for ‘VIPs’.

For number three, ask yourself: why am I on the payroll? Yes, to do lots of activities such as answering emails, managing staff, etc. But what are you paid to achieve? The answer should have a strong link to the bottom line. The activities that make the biggest difference to that bottom line are the ones you need to do more of. That’s the bottom line (see what I did there?).