Multitasking is a lie

I remember in the earlier parts of my career I would proudly label myself as a multi-tasker. It was on my resume, I said it as a strength in interviews, and I loved being know as the girl who could do many things at once.

But guess what?! It was all a lie. Multitasking is a lie! 

The expectation that comes along with being a multi-tasker is that you do multiple things at the same time while maintaining the quality of those things. Well, let me say this first hand. 

It.
Is. 
NOT. 
Possible!As much as you may not want to you do have to believe it, when you mutli-task you are choosing to split up amount of time, energy, and focus goes into completing a task. That will then lead to complete failure of not just one task but MULTIPLE ( ie.mutlti-tasking)!  of time and the expected quality of each thing in your multitasking circle. Let’s take cooking and sending emails at the same time. You are at a higher risk of burning the food AND sending a crappy email. Because while cooking you are trying to rush and complete the food so you can hop back over to the email which makes you miss steps in the cooking process you may forget a seasoning, You might leave the stove on too high. You see the trend here. Been there, burnt that!

Now you are probably asking “how does one get everything done then if not by multitasking?”

Well, the answer is simple.

Do ONE thing at a time.

Cooking? Dedicate an hour to completing it.
Writing a blog post? Dedicate 20- 30 minutes to writing and publishing it.
Have to go attend to another task urgently? Well pause your current task and dedicate a time/date to return to it.

Earlier this year I read the book “The One Thing” it was super helpful in seeing the long-term benefits of literally just doing ONE THING at a time.

I encourage you to stop multitasking for a day and just do one task at a time, from start to finish. You will see that the quality of each task will increase and you will have more completed tasks vs many started tasks.
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Remember being a doer doesn’t mean just working hard and doing a bunch of things, it means working smart and getting things completed with high quality and in an efficient way.