One of my projects of the last year has been turning recordings of speeches and workshops I’ve given into products. I’ve got about 10 I want to produce.
I made the huge mistake of trying to work on several at once. My sound engineer returned to school halfway through. Now, I can’t even locate all the sound files. My brain is trying to focus on several different products at once with the result that I’m making no progress on any of them.
Take things one at a time. I’m going to be doing a section in the book, or at least a Get-it-Done Guy episode, on multitasking versus parallel processing (they’re different, at least as I use them) versus sequential.
- Sequential’s best for the mind.
- Parallel is best for getting things done, assuming you don’t overload yourself.
- Multitasking doesn’t work.
For the closet ADD, sequential is often too much work! Parallel is more comfortable, but only productive if highly structured so you know where you are and what is next. And parallel IS multitasking, isn’t it?
Hmm… I’m using multitasking to mean doing two things at the same time. Parallel means doing task A until you have a forced break (e.g. you are waiting for something from someone else), working on B until you can move forward on A, then returning to A. But you’re not actually doing both at once, and you don’t return to B until there’s another break in A.