One Million Monocles

All my life I’ve been confronted with a very simple fact: I suck at performing multiple tasks at the same time. Lot’s of people live with this predicament, especially men, and when someone feels the need to point that out as a joke, I don’t even try to refute it. It’s just the way my brain works, one thing at a time. We call it “multitasking“, but that’s a term leant from the field of computer software that doesn’t always apply to humans. When we combine cooking with being on the phone and watching TV, we’re more correctly applying “switchtasking”, because we consciently focus on one thing at a time, although the focus may switch up to several times per second. Some people are better at this than others, and I’m way at the bottom.

I find myself sitting at the office, working on a web development project, when e-mail arrives. I get distracted by the sound and the bouncing icons, and feel the urge to instantly open it and read it. That e-mail has someone asking me for something about another project and since I want to help that person, I go and look for that particular file, to open it, make a screenshot and send it back. While I’m performing these tasks, I get an msn message from my girlfriend, informing about the planning of our upcoming vacation to some place nice and sunny. I’m replying to her messages when my phone rings, it’s my mother. I haven’t talked to her in a while, so I leave my other tasks for a moment ant talk to my mom. When I get off the phone I notice I’ve been doing all kinds of things for the past half hour, but my original project hasn’t progressed one bit.

At the end of the day, I keep concluding that the sum of the parts I did resulted in something less than what I expected the whole to be. This recurring conclusion is a very depressing one, and it needs to be solved.

Now one way to solve the problem would be by stretching the time spent at tasks. There are countless books and opinions on this, but let me cut it short this way. By careful planning and communicating your planning to others, you could reserve enough time for each task so the way you work evolves to “unitasking”. While I am a total fan of focussing completely on one thing at a time, at times I don’t want to be thinking about the workflow and just do what I want to do. So I’d like to approach the problem from another angle.

With every task we switch, we have to reestablish the context of that certain task. And it’s the complexity of the context and the amount of deviating tasks you did in between that will have you think “shit, where was I with this project, what’s the next thing I’m trying to achieve?” It’s this question that will often lead you to retrace your steps from the last conscient act, and that’s where you lose your time, focus and energy.

What if there were a tool that would help by providing that task’s specific context for you, in a way that would not require you minutes to retrace your steps and get focussed on that task again, but mere seconds?

To be continued…