Focus Preservation
Multitasking reduces focus and effectiveness. To achieve better results, preserve your focus for the most important tasks that yield 80% of outcomes.
THE IDEA
Chapter 25 How to Preserve Your Focus
The focus is crucial, and accordingly, multitasking is a lie. When you multitask, what you’re doing is you’re essentially spreading yourself too thin and allocating your focusing power among different competing tasks. What do you think the net effect would be? You wouldn’t have enough focus left to handle the most important items of the day.
Unfortunately, if you are wasting your focus on stuff that doesn’t matter all that much, like email or social media, you won’t have much left to tackle the heavy stuff. These are the items that produce 80 percent of your results. The good news is that you can set up your daily task schedule in such a way that you can preserve your focus.
When to use it
Scheduling deep work blocks for high-priority projects without interruptions.
Batching routine tasks like email and social media checking to specific times.
Applying the 80/20 rule to identify tasks with the most leverage and focusing on them.
Setting boundaries with colleagues to avoid interruptions during focused work sessions.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Checking Email While Working
A common example of multitasking is checking email while trying to write a report. This divides attention, reduces the quality of both tasks, and increases overall time. Instead, batch email checking to designated times to preserve focus for deep work.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
How often do you multitask during your most important work? What tasks could you batch to preserve focus?
What are the 20% of tasks that produce 80% of your results? How can you protect focus for those?
What distractions can you eliminate to protect your focus during high-priority work?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Thinking in Systems and Mental Models Think Like a Super Thinker (Dawson, Marcus P)