How to Stop Multitasking and Boost Your Writing Productivity
By: Rebecca E. Neely
Tags: Work, Productivity, Time Management, Self Improvement, Writing

Although multitasking is often equated with increased productivity, research shows the exact opposite is true.

Instead, simply doing one thing at a time, and batching your work whenever possible not only enables you to get more accomplished, but helps you avoid decision fatigue, a.k.a. reclaim your power, focus and sanity.

Here’s my take as seen through the lens of twenty years’ experience as both a desk jockey in corporate America, where the new ‘job’ normal seems to be that everyone does more than one, and a ‘one man band’ writer.

We don’t work that way anymore

Jason Fried, co-founder and president of 37signals, a Chicago-based company that builds web-based productivity tools, explains in TED Talk, ‘Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work’, you essentially don’t have a work day anymore, you have work moments.

Think about it. You sit and work on something for fifteen minutes before a meeting crops up, or a coworker invades your cubicle space. Once that’s done, you resume work, only to have the same cycle repeat in an hour or two.

Similarly, as a writer, how many times have you just started to get into your chapter or article, only to have the phone ring, or your partner interrupt you or (insert pet peeve here) and your ideas and inspiration evaporate?

While it’s more within your power as a writer than it is at the day job to keep distractions to a minimum, it’s impossible to avoid them all. And they come in many forms, including email, phone calls, family members, and our own addiction to social media.

Either way, we wonder why, though we’ve worked all day, we feel like we’ve accomplished nothing. Those interruptions are the offenders. The bad actors. You also feel that way because you’re trying to work on one job for a half hour, then another, then switch back, in the hopes it’ll be seamless.

It’s not.

Meaningful work

You rarely reach a point when you can achieve ‘flow’, or meaningful work because you’re disrupted so frequently. Per Fried, “People really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done.”

He compares achieving meaningful work to the stages of sleep. In order to get to the point where you’re in a deep sleep, you have to go through the earlier phases. If you’re interrupted, you can’t pick up where you left off. You have to go back a few phases to start again. In other words, you lose momentum.

Same applies to the day job, and your writing. The sheer volume of work can overwhelm you, obliterate your focus, stop your momentum before you ever get started.

If you’re like me, it’s difficult to watch your emails stack up, unread. Tasks loom, incomplete. Posts go unscheduled. Ideas sit, undeveloped. Chapters hang, unfinished. I want to do it all. Now.

However, much worse is the crazed, frenetic feeling I have when I try to switch back and forth between jobs or tasks. It takes time to get into the mindset, or ‘flow’, of each.

Trying to jockey between them in the course of an hour, say, is not only exhausting, it increases the chance for error a hundred fold. I can’t remember what I was doing. I make mistakes. Lose my train of thought. My writing is uninspired.

Bottom line, I’m not productive. And to boot, it robs me of joy.

The surprisingly simple solution

I see the solution as making yourself, and everyone else, wait.

It’s frighteningly obvious, but doing one thing at a time is the best way to be productive. This is commonly called batching, and what I like to think of as the remedy for decision fatigue.

By doing one task for a set amount of time, you can take advantage of the benefits of batching — you’re focusing on one thing, you’re gaining momentum, and you’re avoiding the brain drain of decisions. Per Fried, you’re in ‘flow.’

Projectmanager.com advocates batching tasks such as answering emails, editing, image creation, brainstorming, and meetings. Setting aside two hours for scheduling social media content, for example, then setting a timer increases your focus and efficiency.

Avoiding decision fatigue requires some planning. Developgoodhabits.com suggests making your most important decisions first thing in the morning, limiting and simplifying your choices, and removing unnecessary distractions.

Here’s what that looks like for me as a writer. Creating new material in the morning and editing and scheduling social media posts in the afternoon or evening. Regardless, I’m ruthless about leaving my phone in another room. It’s just too tempting to jump on and check this or that — every time I do, I’m shooting myself in the foot.

And at the day job, that means if I’m supposed to work on Job A on Tuesday afternoon, then I work on Job A on Tuesday afternoon. I don’t try to work on Job B and Job C when I have a few extra minutes. Or as a knee jerk reaction to someone else’s request.

Bottom line, it’ll be there tomorrow, and those few minutes can end up costing me an hour down the line in momentum.

The payoff

Following this protocol has helped me get more accomplished, gifted me with more time. Inspiration. For example, I find I have more time to devote to both non-fiction and fiction projects. I’m still a ‘one man band’, but I’m more efficient in completing my range of tasks in the time I have. And at the day job, I’m making fewer errors and feeling more satisfied. Overall, it’s imparted a sense of relief and joy, calm and control I wouldn’t have expected.

Focus requires discipline. Breaking bad habits. It’s a battle, daily, as I want to tackle what I see needing done immediately. It requires me to retrain myself. Shift my mindset. But it pays off. Big.

By approaching my writing with the same ‘one thing at a time’ attitude I’ve adopted at the day job, I’ve boosted my productivity by giving myself dedicated, uninterrupted time.

And that, as Fried says — and I’m sure we would all agree — is one of the greatest gifts you can give someone.