Finish this blog now!
Am I productive person? Yes for most of times. Am I a creative person? I think I am. Every time I think of productivity, I usually think of the times when I was learning how to write English letters when I was in grade school. Yes it is a repetitive and boring work for a kid to do at a young age, but what I had in my mind at that time was that this is a simple assignment, and if I want to get this done by doing my best in order to do more complex and bigger assignment in the future. Whenever I am doing an assignment or project, I will focus on this one thing and try to finish it in certain time periods if possible.
Have I ever encountered time when I just cannot focus my attention? Yes. Both cyber life and real life are filled with distractions, I tried to do multitasking for most of times; but I found out that it is impossible to get even one thing done. According to National Academy of Sciences, it says that “Heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli.” Instead, single-tasking is really what I should do for my assignments, it is easy for me to do one thing at one time because that was what I did in grade school to learn writing English letters. If I have 100% attention I can spend all of them on this writing this blog now, I know I can definitely get this blog done or at least finish it until the part where I want to stop.
In order to do single tasking you need to focus, leave all the things behind and focus on the thing you are working on right now; it sounds hard but it works really well if you actually do it. It is like building a house, you need to start with one brick at a time so that the house will not fall apart after the construction. It will take times but it is definitely worthy because every brick you used is more stable and solid. An assignment will probably take more than an hour or even longer to finish, but if you divide this one hour time period into six ten minutes time slot, you can make this whole process much easier. For example, when I plan to write this blog in one hour, I can use the first one to three ten minutes slots to writing these paragraphs, and another one to two ten minutes slot for finding resources including pictures, hyperlinks and etc., and last ten minute slot for finalizing everything such as checking spelling errors, adding hashtags, and previewing the blog before publish it.
In David Allen’s two minute rule, he thinks that if an action takes less than two minutes to do, then go do it right away. That is how it works, it narrows your attention into this one thing without caring about other things happening around you; this thing only takes less than two minutes to do it, so why don’t you go ahead and do it without thinking too much about the results and reasons. The more you think about these reasons and results, the more frustrated you will get, and the harder for you to focus on this task.
Most of us think we can do multitasking because of the commitment and assignments we have in every day, but it is easy for us to not accomplish all these things because we cannot distribute our limited time averagely into all these different tasks. Doing one task at one time is definitely easier for us to use our time more efficiently and effectively. We want more things in life because of our sinful greedy nature, but when it comes to finishing tasks, do not take too much at one time.
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