Time Efficiency — Killing many birds with just one stone

The more I consider how to be efficient with time, the more I come to realise that multi-tasking or task switching is a really inefficient practice. It drains our cognitive capacity, it is exhausting and destroys our overall productivity. It is impossible to be effective with your time if you try to do more than one thing at the same time. However, it pays to consider how you can achieve more than one result by doing just one thing. This is the next consideration in Time Efficiency — Killing many birds with just one stone.

The most common way to do this is to do something that you need to do anyway with someone else. But there are others.

Result & Relationship

A few years back we began a Christmas tradition. We need to get a Christmas Tree every year. That’s the result — buy a Christmas Tree. This had always been something I did on my own. Then one year I took a child with me. Now I take them all. I will admit, the task takes a bit longer now than when it was just me, and you could argue it is therefore less time efficient. But the truth is, we achieve the result, we build the relationship, we create memories and we set a pattern for future generations of our family to follow. Most people won’t think much of this as you do this kind of thing anyway, but take the example and look at…