As humans we all have 24 hours to live and complete our activities daily. Quite often we don’t get time to complete everything we had originally planned. As a developer multiTasking always lure us subconsciously. What we actually need is mastering the art of completing one task at a time.
Of late I have gained interest in podcasts and I have a long list of episodes to go through. The first thought will be to combine it with tasks that I am already doing, for example writing code. We developers have a habit of playing music in the background when we code. But this time I decided to play podcast in the background instead of music, just to save time and complete all the pending episodes.
However I should tell you that the whole experience was not at all productive. And I advice against the idea of multi-tasking.
Multitasking does not improves your productivity
The result from my experiment was that I was not able to follow what the podcast was all about. At any given point of time either I was too involved in writing code or I was listening to the podcast.
Takuya Matsuyama recently in one of his article quotes :
Human beings are, essentially, single-core processors.
We can’t effectively check our email, listen to someone asking us for feedback on a project, and take notes simultaneously. We can do it, sure, but everything suffers. Juggling tasks divides your attention, increases the time spent refocusing on important tasks (making you less productive)
and I completely agree with him. I don’t know about others but if you are falling behind in completing your daily chores, you need to reprioritise.
Focus on one thing at a time
First of all we need to understand the difference between acting busy and actually being busy. Just because you engage yourself in many activities does not mean your productivity increases. You will end up in doing chunks of every task but not completing anything.
What are you willing to give up in order to become the person you are meant to be? Jim Kwik
Focus on things that really require your attention and leave out everything else. We need to accept the fact that something will be left out of our calendar and it is completely fine. This brings me to the next point which is very crucial.
Master the art of letting things go
In today's world where we surround ourselves with social media, mastering the art of letting go becomes very essential, why? I will tell you.
You might have witnessed this too, no matter how much time you devote to social media, you can never watch/read/click every social media post. It’s a never ending circle and ultimately it just drains the energy out of you. Juggling social media while you are working will only add to your stress level. Stop it.We think checking out a bit of news feed or stories or posts will probably just take 5 minutes but before you realise, you end up spending more than 30 minutes. The 30 minutes you lost is not that crucial.
The crucial part is the time you require to go back in the zone where you were before those 30 minutes. Getting my point?
To simplify, I would like to conclude that multi-tasking may sound cool but in reality you tend to hinder your productivity and are more prone to make mistakes. Your focus is diverted and you require more energy to concentrate. Give it a thought.
This article was originally published on my Medium
Over the last few months, I’ve been exploring the idea of creative writing for developers . Come say hi on Twitter If you’re interested in learning more about how creative writing can help you excel as a developer
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