Today, I realised I was trying to send a work email, while teaching my eight-year-old equivalent fractions. The result? I wasn’t really focussed on either.
It made me think about multi-tasking v single-tasking.
With multi-tasking, we aren’t actually doing more than one thing at a time; we’re rapidly switching between tasks, apparently losing 20% efficacy each task.
It’s also understood that our ability to focus is around 20 minutes at a time; why do you think TED Talks are 18 minutes long? Some argue that our attention span has dropped to as low as 5 minutes.
The Stanford Memory Lab examined 10 years of studies on multi-taskers to find “not a single published paper that shows a significant positive relationship between working memory and multitasking”.
So trying to multitask is bad right?
The difficulty is that according to a Harvard study, 47% of our waking hours are spent thinking about something other than what we’re currently doing – bummer!
The most common culprits stopping us from single tasking are: distractions, too much to do and unclear priorities.
So how do I stop trying to work and home school at the same time.
Firstly, I need to recognise that it’s not necessary. The world will not collapse if I give my son 100% of my attention for 20 minutes. It is a choice, not an easy choice, some would say impossible, but a choice, nonetheless.
Secondly, I need to remove distractions, the phone, the laptop, the coffee; get them all out of eyesight. If my mind wanders, I will bring it back to my focus point (equivalent fractions remember!).
Thirdly, starting small and building up is always the right way to go. I won’t be able to single task for a whole day at a time but setting small goals to do so and winning at that will do nicely.
Lastly, I’ll allow myself a meaningful break between each single-task, instead of going into panic mode and trying to “catch up” on that urgent email I might have missed while my son needs to pee (back to the first step – it’s not necessary).
I might then have a chance to do some things well, including learning what an equivalent fraction is.
