This sentence is critical. We need to make sure we understand the difference between multi-tasking and task-shifting. Multi-tasking is attempting to execute tasks simultaneously, while task-shifting is when we move from one task to another.
Multi-tasking, as your article and current research show, doesn’t work. But task-shifting is a natural part of anyone’s daily routine (Since there is no such thing as only doing 1 thing a day).
Mastering task-shifting means optimizing the momentum we maintain across projects we work on each day. Momentum occurs when we never break the chain. If a task is touched every day with religious adherence then it has perfect momentum. Momentum is crucial to our most important tasks since it ensures we never lose our place, allowing the natural forces of iteration and fresh perspective to produce an astounding aggregate of work.
Of course there are too many projects on our daily list to maintain perfect momentum across all of them. This is where staggering comes in. While our most important tasks should have perfect momentum, other, less critical tasks can still benefit from a moderate level of momentum. For example, writing your book and managing your client’s project should have perfect momentum (touched every day), while working on a blog post and going to the gym could be staggered (blog day 1, gym day 2, blog day 3, gym day 4, etc.)
We can prioritize our work effectively by assigning a level of momentum to each task. This ensures we limit the amount of work in a single day as we focus on less tasks, while still maintaining momentum across a larger list of things we want to accomplish.
Mastering task-shifting and momentum means we can achieve the “flow state” not only at the granular task level, but also on the longer-range scale of days, weeks and months. It also comes with the added benefit of idea cross-pollination. If we limit ourselves to too few tasks over the long run we lose the ability to make interesting conceptual connections between tasks (e.g. the solution I used for project A could be used for project B). By managing momentum properly we ensure only a few tasks are touched each day, while also ensuring many tasks are touched longer term. The cross-pollination of ideas allows us to hit the proverbial 2 birds with one stone saving us an immense amount of time and effort.
Once we understand the difference between multi-tasking and task-shifting, and learn to prioritize our tasks by assigning momentum effectively, we can maintain high productivity on the tasks that define our personal and professional lives.
That’s my approach. Thanks for your post.
