Author: Chris Angell / Source: Lifehack
When you’re hungry to grow, expand and drink deeply of life, you want to be as productive as possible. And with so many choices of how to drink deeply of life, we can add a lot to our plate. Enter multitasking management that will improve your productivity.
It starts, innocently enough, with inspired action and a will to accomplish, build and fulfill what’s in our heart or mind to create.
But if we’re not careful, it quickly turns into being buried in work and delayed outcomes rather than the productivity we thought we were creating.Let’s be clear on what we mean by multitasking before we get into the tips on how to improve your productivity. Managing multiple tasks simultaneously actually impairs productivity. And your quest to be more productive will come down to how well you can focus on the task at hand. To divert your attention away from the task at hand will only make it take longer.
In The One Thing by billionaire Gary Keller, he says
“Extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous.”
You need to focus on the vital few tasks, not the trivial many, that will get you to your goal.
So let’s agree that by “multitasking”, we mean the many tasks you have to do, not doing them simultaneously. This article is about how we manage the many tasks we have to do in such a way that we improve our productivity in both quantity and quality so we can live the life we’ve envisioned living.
1. Adjust Your Expectations
I’ve found that the more projects I take on, the more tasks I have to manage. That sounds obvious but it’s a critical distinction. Most people take on way too much and have impossible expectations that they can get it all done.
With every project comes more details than we can predict. If you’re not careful, you’ll take on too many projects that bury you in tasks you have no hope of managing.
I did this a ton in my twenties. It was exciting to dream of all that I wanted. I would dabble in a handful of ideas and then move on to the next when I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted. From the outside, it might have looked like I was “multitasking”, but I wasn’t getting where I wanted to go.
The downside of dabbling with all these ideas was that I started to see myself as someone who couldn’t produce a result. It erodes your confidence when you take on a ton of projects and then can’t move any of them to the place you had in your mind to take them.
So this first tip is a big one because it will impact your ability to manage whatever other tasks you choose to put on your plate. Choose wisely.
2. Choose Wisely
You can’t do it all. You know that. But what’s the threshold of what you can do? It’s a lot less than you think, which means you have to choose wisely the tasks you take on to produce the most you can in the time you give it.
When launching my marketing agency I had to do most of the tasks. And as our clients grew so did the tasks I had to manage. I waited longer than I should have to find help and this cost me a loss in growth during the time I held on to all the tasks. It also caused stress that impacted my ability to focus and show up as the best version of myself. I had to find the vital few tasks that would grow my company. I had to choose wisely what I would spend my time on.
Once you have chosen the vital few tasks you will manage, you will either have to make peace with letting the other tasks go or outsource them to someone else.
3. Outsource
Focused on the vital few, my company began to grow again and I found myself buried in more tasks than I could handle. This is the nature of success.
As your productivity grows, so does your to-do list. It was clear I couldn’t multitask my way out of this one and continue to grow. So I began to build my team of contractors I could outsource my growing list of details to.
This is an important tip because many of us never ask for help. If we work for someone else, it’s easy to think we’re a better team player if we can show that we can do it all.
If you own your own business, it’s easy to think you can’t afford the help you need. And so, we get buried in the details and read articles about multitasking, hoping they’ll provide some answers or relief about how we can get more done in our already overloaded schedule.
Delegating and outsourcing to good contractors has become so much easier as more and more talented people step into the gig economy. At my company, we use Upwork.com on a daily basis. We have also used Fiverr.com and the many resources available in the Envato marketplace. In this day and age, you don’t have to do it all yourself. There is an entire ecosystem you can outsource to and it costs a lot less than you think.
Moreover, it’s costing you much more in lost productivity to shoulder it all and not outsource. By outsourcing, you can refocus on managing the list of the vital tasks that move the needle toward your desired outcome.
4. List Management
I always carried my action items in my head, until it was so full that I had…
The post 9 Tips on Multitasking Management That Will Improve Your Productivity appeared first on FeedBox.