It’s one thing at a time,” the management experts Gary Keller and Jay Papasan point out in their book The One Thing, which does little but hammer home this simple yet somehow endlessly elusive truth. So a big part of the skill of doing one thing at a time is learning to handle the discomfort associated with knowing what you’re not getting done. The fact is that you can’t afford not to postpone almost everything, at any given moment, if you want to make progress on anything. Nobody likes being told that they should shelve (say) their fitness goals for a few months while they work on their marriage, or resign themselves to an overfilled inbox while they complete an important piece of writing when everything’s urgent, postponement feels like a luxury you can’t afford. Commit to actually achieving a few of your ambitions, rather than wallowing in fantasies of one day achieving them all The result isn’t merely that you make a smaller amount of progress on a larger number of fronts it’s that you make less progress overall. So when a task feels difficult or scary – as tasks that matter often do – you can just bounce off to another one instead. Worse, each activity becomes a way of avoiding every other activity. For a start, plenty of research testifies to the costs of “task-switching”: when you flit between activities, you waste time and energy regaining a state of focus again and again. And when you think your life’s a mess – you should be exercising more, sorting out your finances, improving your relationship with your kids, and on and on – it’s similarly reassuring to feel you’re tackling all those critical issues, not just one.īut the feeling is deceptive. When you’re drowning in to-dos, it’s calming to feel that you’re addressing lots of them simultaneously. One main reason this is harder than it looks is that doing several things at once is usually a way of assuaging anxiety. The single most effective ingredient for a happier and more meaningful 2021 is the exact opposite: to improve your capacity for doing only one thing at a time. At new year, it often takes an additional form: the desire to implement a total life makeover, sorting out your work backlog and your relationship issues, your health and your home repairs all at once.
#Focus on one thing plus#
But for a variety of reasons – overwork, digital distraction, plus the boundary-blurring consequences of the pandemic – it’s probably never been worse. T he urge to do too many things at once is nothing new: as long ago as 1887, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was bemoaning the way “one thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market”.
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