To Multi-Task or Not To Multi-Task?

Hello and welcome to episode 249 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

How do you manage running a new business, or even running your own department with multiple things happening each day and projects that need to be got off the ground, or maintained. It a real challenge and leave you feeling exhausted, and more importantly, stressed out about what you may or may not have done.

This is one of the many reasons why getting yourself organised and being consistent with your daily and weekly planning is so important. It’s this planning that gives you an edge. It elevates you above the fray and keeps you focused on the bigger picture.

Without a plan for the week, you will inevitably get sucked into the daily churn of low and high important tasks. It will feel endless and it doesn’t lead to a great outcome. Sure, you may have a reasonably successful business or department, but you, as an individual, will be exhausted, tired and stressed out and that leads to poor decision making and mistakes.

Now, before we get into the question, I just wanted to give you a heads up that I have just launched my latest mini-course. The Goal Setting course will give you a blueprint to build the life you want to live by developing the vision of what you want, and then using goals to make sure you are moving along the right pathway.

It’s an exciting course that will inspire you to grow, develop and start making the changes you need to make to become the person you want to be.

Full details of this mini-course will be in the show notes.

Now, on with this show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Cara. Cara asks: Hi Carl, I run a growing start up business and have found managing multiple tasks and projects each day is a real pain point. How would you suggest we manage multi-tasking to keep the business running and developing new projects?

Hi Cara, thank you for your question.

Now, we better first deal with the concept of “multi-tasking”. Straight up, don’t ever do it. Or rather try to do it. It’s impossible, never works and only leads to mistakes which will need correcting later.

Slow down. There is more than enough time each day to work on the important things. You don’t have to do everything in one day. I know our minds are telling us it has to be done today, but really? Does it?

When you step back, take a breath and look at what you have on your list of things to do, you will see that many of those tasks don’t really need to be done today. It might be nice to be able to do them, but it would not be the end of your business if you rescheduled the less important tasks to later in the week.

Now, there’s a good reason for rescheduling less important things to later in the week and that is most of these will not need doing anyway. They are what I call “reactive” tasks. Tasks that seem important right now, but with a little time resolve themselves and can be discarded.

I’m reminded of a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who would put aside his letters and memos for ten days before reading them. What he found was 90% of the issues resolved themselves and the remaining 10% was where he needed to put his attention.

Now, in today’s world things move a lot faster than they did in the 1980s, but the principle still remains, most of what comes into our inboxes will resolve themselves, there is no need to rush. You can put aside most issues for twenty-four to forty-eight hours without any problems. When you do come to them, it’s likely many of them will have resolved themselves.

I’m always surprised at how many emails I get asking a question, only to find an hour later the same person writes to tell me they’ve resolved the issue. That taught me to slow down and not rush into a response.

Of course, there are some issues that do need dealing with straight away. But most don’t. Learn to slow down. You will thank yourself for that later.

Now, I mentioned in the opening about the importance of planning. Planning is the key to staying on top of everything being thrown at you. You need some time each day and week to step back and evaluate what is important. What needs to get done about all else.

For instance, last week, my priority was to launch my Goal Setting course. I still had my core work to do—content and coaching client feedback—but aside from that work, my priority last week was launching the course.

Now, this was not the first course I have launched, so I have a process for launching courses. However, that process still requires a lot of time. This meant, each day last week, I made sure my core work was done early. For instance, on Monday, when I wrote the blog post, I started my day by getting that written. Once that was written, I blocked out two hours to work on the course.

For those of you who don’t know, your core work is your most important work—the work you are employed to do. If you are a salesperson, your core work is any activity that results in a sale. If you are an analyst, your core work is any activity that involves analysing. Everything else (email replies, meetings and admin work) is secondary to that.

When I finished each day, I gave myself ten minutes to go through my task list to see what I had on for the next day and prioritised two things: my core work and the course. I then looked at my calendar to see where I could fit those tasks in.

This month I have two courses to work on. That’s unusual, not only do I need to launch my Goal Setting mini-course, but I also need to work on the update to my Apple Productivity course. It would be easy to stress myself about the Apple Productivity course, but what’s the point? I can only work on one course at a time, so the only question is which one do I work on tomorrow?

Now that the goals setting course is launched, I can turn my attention to updating my Apple Productivity course. My work is much more manageable and realistic.

If I had tried to do both at the same time, I would be stressed out and inevitably make a lot of mistakes that will need to be resolved later.

The key is to focus on one project at a time. Of course, you may have multiple projects going on at the same time, but given that you cannot work effectively on two or more projects at the same time, you need to decide, at a weekly level, which projects you will focus on that week.

One thing that has worked for me, is to allocate time each week for certain activities. I also know a lot of business founders have also found this method effective. That is to block time out each day of the week for certain activities.

For instance, email and communications. These come in every day and it’s unlikely you will be able to stop them. This means, you need time each day for managing your communications. For me, I need around forty minutes a day to stay on top of my communications. So, I have a one hour block each day between 7 and 8pm for responding to my actionable messages.

Find an appropriate time in the day and block it out on your calendar for managing your email.

Other activities you need to do regularly, for example, prospecting, accounting, admin and your personal life need time allocating to them. You could dedicate Mondays to prospecting, Tuesdays to admin and Fridays to accounting. Wednesday and Thursday could be dedicated to project work.

Knowing you have time allocated to prospecting, admin and accounting leaves you feeling less stressed and it makes it easier to decide when you will do something.

I would add, that it helps to keep one day each week as free as possible for catching up when you have fallen behind with something.This is one of those inevitable things in life that our carefully laid out plans will get disrupted by an emergency. Knowing you have a reasonably free day later in the week for catching up helps to keep ion track with the things we need to do.

Finally, as a start-up business everything will be new and so you won’t have any settled processes in place. It’s important to be looking for the process for doing your work. I have a number of admin tasks to do each day. When I first began collecting the information, it would take me around ninety minutes each day. I focused on building the process and now, three or four years later, I still have the same admin tasks to do, but it takes me around twenty minutes to do.

Because I have settled processes, I know how to start, where to look for the information and can do the work in a lot less time.

If your projects are similar in nature—in my case creating or updating courses—you can develop checklists and processes there too. This makes doing project work a lot easier. You know where to start, have a reasonably good idea how long each part will take and you can build that time into your calendar.

Essentially, it all boils down to giving yourself time each day and each week to look at what needs to be done and planning out when you will do the work. If you are not planning out when the work will get done, your brain will convince you that you don’t have sufficient time—when you do—and that’s where stress and anxiety will come from.

Make sure you are planning the week. Identifying which project, or projects, you will work on each week. On a daily level, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to plan the next day. What will be your priority the next day and make sure you have the time blocked out in your calendar so you know you have the time to work on it.

I hope that has helped, Cara. Thank you for your question.

And thank you to you too for listening.

Don’t forget, if you want to learn more about my brand new Goal Setting course, the links are in the show notes.

It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.