Time Efficiency — Focus on just one thing

Time is a finite resource. Today you have 24 hours. Yesterday it was the same. In fact every day of your life you will have 24 hours except for 2 days. The day you are born and the day you die. So, a question that we often ask is — how can I make the most of that time? There are many answers to this that will focus on priority and questions of importance. These are all good things to think about. We should also consider time efficiency. Time efficiency is what comes into play after we have decided how to use our time. How do we maximise the efficiency of the time we have for the things we are spending it on. Here’s one thing to consider. Time efficiency — focus on just one thing.

With so many demands on our lives and our time, we inevitably will end up trying to ‘multitask’. This is a really bad idea and is a really inefficient use of time.

Multi-tasking is switch tasking

When we multi-task we think we are doing two things at once. Research that I have read suggests that this is impossible for the human brain to do. Read that again. It is impossible for the human brain to focus on more than one thing at a time. There is a classic example of this idea. Have you seen the video of a large group of people passing balls back and forth between them? Half are wearing white and half are wearing black. Your task is count the number of passes that people wearing white make. At the end of the video the voice over declares that if you counted 13 passes you are correct….but did you…