Hang on, I'll be with you in a minute. Yeah. What did you say? That that's what you've got to stop doing. If you truly want to be productive, highly productive people realize it's a fantasy to think you can multitask. There is no such thing as multitasking.
Your human brain can really focus on one thing at a time. We can tell ourselves, we're great multitaskers we're not effective, productive people focused on one thing at a time. They finish it and they do the next thing. When the human brain goes back and forth between writing this memo being on this call, answering this text, there are switching costs. It slows you down dramatically and it destroys your basic competence. The quality of what you're doing plummets.
Now there's been so much research on this. And this is not an academic textbooks, I'm not going to give you 1000 footnotes. You can google it yourself. But if you want to dramatically improve your effectiveness, your productivity, you're going to have to realize there just is no such thing as effective. multitasking. If you doubt me Look at all the people dying on the highways because they think they can text and drive at the same time.
Everyone thinks they're great at multitasking and texting and driving until they run into someone else and kill themselves and the other person. Your brain can't focus on more than one thing. And, of course, there may be things that are just truly unimportant, where you're doing two things at once. I do brush my teeth when I'm in the shower. And I am multitasking in the sense but it doesn't really matter. If I do one of those things less than perfectly because my teeth will get brushed, as long as I get the soap off of me, the shower will happen.
But for anything important for your business, for your career for communication, for talking to a client, customer or prospect for creating something of lasting value, you need focus now there gazillion apps that will turn off your access to Facebook and other things. But you don't need a million apps. For starters, just turn your phone off. Put it away. Close all the other websites that you're going to be tempted to check out what's new at the Huffington Post. In the middle of writing an important memo, just write the important memo.
Put everything else away. highly productive people do this, but your phones will tell people you're not available. He will understand you don't have to be unavailable for two months. But for 30 minutes at certain points of the day, make yourself unavailable. Focus, focus focus. Tell yourself I'm not a multitasker.
If you do that your productivity will soar.