With the recent technological development, people expect us to deliver output more quickly. After all, computers and PDAs have certainly made our jobs easier and faster. Sometimes, however, we also take on too many tasks at once, thinking that we can cram everything into our schedule. The end result is, we actually can never get things done on time. Are we trying to do everything at once? Are we trying to be the multi-tasker that people now talk about? At the very core of the word is the idea of selective ignoring. This is the root of all your problems because we can never be ideally productive.

As much as we boast that we can do several things at the same time, our minds can only focus on one thing at a time. Whenever we try to do more, we don’t know what to fully concentrate on. We do things haphazardly just so we can move on to the next task as quickly as possible. We end up interrupting ourselves in the middle of work so that refocus on another task.

The only way to become productive is to focus on one thing at a time until its completion. Like a juggler, we have to keep our eyes glued on what we are doing at the moment or else everything falls out of whack. Just think, how many times do we get interrupted in a day? We also have to worry about the flood of emails, unexpected phone calls, and incoming messages. These little things, when added up, do really take most of the time away from us. We may not notice it, but if we were to isolate ourselves from all the noise and chaos, we’d soon realize just how quickly we can do work.

Multitasking is something that we cannot avoid. Although we are forced to balance our time between doing two things, this does not mean that were merely have to accept it all the time. If we increase our workload and make the deadlines shorter, we try to cram all we need to do in such a short span of time. Fact is, our minds can only make one decision at a time. As we try to take on everything, our brain cannot handle all the information at one go. Instead, it switches back and forth. We demand so much of ourselves but nothing can actually amount to much.

In the end, we don’t become as intelligent as we would want because we don’t really ask our brains to delvelop deeper into things. Moreover, when we realize that we haven’t done much, not only are we wasting valuable time, but we are actually showing others that we aren’t very productive. The more distracted we are, the more mistakes we make.

We must give our minds a chance to relax, otherwise, we end up suffering from burnout earlier than expected. Remember, we always must put ourselves above everything else. We need to learn the value of focus and divide our work in sizable chunks. That way, we get a lot done and we’ve given our full attention to whatever it is we had to do.