Staying Focused

I attended a great webinar this week that began by stating that multi-tasking is a myth.  This was jarring news to me as I was in front of the ZOOM screen taking in the training while signing receipts, reading an email, and drinking my tea.  What they said I have heard before and this is that it is an illusion that we are being more productive trying to do many things at once.  That we lose time regaining focus from one task to another, that there is an attention residue left from the email we just read as we turn back to the report we are writing and as such we are not at our best doing any of it.  So, the lesson of the day was to work to espouse the age-old practice of single tasking.  Being intentional about doing just one thing well, just one task that has a full attention and just one focus for our attention to remain solidly on.  This is very difficult and that was noted by the trainers.  We are becoming hard wired to drift, if we wait more than 30 seconds in a line, we pull out our phone for a check.  When I watch TV, I seem to be in a bad habit of googling that actors to see what else they have done on my phone.  It was said that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds according to studies for your focus to completely return to a task.  If that is true it would mean that almost all the time our brains are transitioning their focus and perhaps, we are never completely on task, completely zoned in, and we are working to make great gains and do good things with only a portion of our brain riding shotgun.  The speaker urged us to be ruthless with our attention, to clump up like tasks and focus, to block times when we don’t let other things distract and to try to just do one thing at a time.  I guess what I especially liked was that at the end of the training it was reinforced that this is hard, there is no magic solution or tool and that we just need to keep on making little adjustments to try to make our days better, more productive and in the end more enjoyable.  What is one small shift you could make today toward single tasking?  A few moments where you were not focused on multiple things, a tiny adjustment that made each day could lead to big results.  Decide what needs a big focus and then zoom in on it for a little while, as you can, in your day, see if there is a difference.