Many people believe they’re good at doing multiple things at once.
But here’s the myth about multitasking…
There’s no such thing! You can’t do two things at one time. Instead, what you’re really doing is you’re switching between two tasks really quickly.
Don’t believe me? Try this…
Get a clean sheet of paper and divide it into three columns. And what you’re going to do is…
In column one, you're going to write the even numbers between 2 and 24. For example, two, four, six, eight and so on.
In the middle column, you're going to write the months of the year in long-hand. January, February, March, April, May… etc.
And in the third column, you’re going to write the odd numbers from one to 23. Like this: one, three, five… You get the idea.
Now, I should mention that you're going to do this exercise twice. So you’ll need two sheets of paper, both divided into three columns.
The first time, you’re going to fill the columns individually. For example, you’re going to write all the even numbers down in column one first. Then you'll move to the middle column and write down all the months in long-hand. And after that, you'll move to column three and fill all the odd numbers down.
The second time round, you’re going to use multitasking for the same exercise.
And as a multitasker, you’re going to fill the columns horizontally, one row at a time. Meaning, you're going to switch between all of the columns all the way through. For example, for the first row you're going to write two, January, one. For the second row you’re going to write four, February, three. And so on.
Next. Set a timer to, say, 15 seconds… and... go! Do the exercise one, filling each column separately.
When the buzzer rings, count how many columns you managed to finish. After that, set the timer to 15 seconds again. And start doing the second exercise; filling one row at a time. Ready? Go!
Again, when the buzzer rings, count how many columns you managed fill.
And finally, compare the results.
Now here’s the thing...
Unless you’re a super fast writer, what you’ll notice is you filled more columns when you were doing them separately... than when you were filling them all at the same time, row by row...
Because in the second exercise, you either filled them all at the same time, or none at all!
And guess what? Same is true for your business as well.
When you have three or four or five projects going on at the same time, none of them are actually done. They’re all sort of half done.
But what’s actually more valuable to you is to get the most important project done as soon as you can. And then move on to the next one, and then the next one… and so forth.
Because six months down the road, all those finished projects are still going to be useful to you. They’re still going to create value and bring money in.
But if you keep doing them all at the same time…
There's a good chance that 5 years from now, you’re still hoping to get the very first project done.