When there’s a lot to do, it can be tempting to split our time, trying to inch forward in several different directions. And although doing this may make us feel like we’re making progress, it’s usually not the most effective approach.
One reason is sometimes it can take a little while to get into a groove on whatever we’re working on (some would say, into a flow). Perhaps you’ve experienced this. After working a while, you’re mentally and physically focused, and you begin making progress. And if you stay in the state, you continue to be effective in what you’re doing.
But if you constantly switch contexts, moving your attention from one thing to the next, you may never reach this state of flow. And when you come back to the task, it takes additional time to get reacclimatized to where you left off, and what needs to be done. You end up getting less done in the same amount of time, due to the cognitive costs of switching back and forth.
Not only does focusing on one thing at a time provide an opportunity to do better work more efficiently, it also provides an opportunity to clarify what exactly you should be doing to begin with. By choosing one thing to work on, you’re also forced to decide what’s the ‘one thing’ to tackle. Ideally, this would be the most important thing that needs to be done. Picking only one forces a choice; picking half a dozen can make the priority less clear.
And if you pick the most important thing and are able to get that done, but aren’t able to get to the rest, you’re still often in a better place than if you had tried to do everything, but didn’t get any of them done.
Focusing on one at a time may ‘seem’ like it’s going to take longer, but it’s amazing how much can be done when we give our undivided attention to something until it’s complete.
P.S. If you use Chrome, Momentum is a nice little plugin that provide a little help in identifying and remembering what we should be focusing on each day.