Many of us women pride ourselves in our seeming-ability to multi-task. But are we moving forward toward our goals? Are we actually productive or just busy? Today’s challenge focuses on seeing the difference between deep work and multi-tasking and making the needed changes in your life.
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This post is Day #10 of our 25-Day Productivity Challenge! You can find the entire round-up HERE. Make sure you pin this post so you can find it later and don’t forget to take action!
What is Multi-Tasking?
Multi-tasking is trying to divide our attention between multiple tasks at once. Now, to be sure, you can fold laundry while you listen to a podcast because one task requires attention and the other is authomatic.
But to do your best work, multi-tasking is not your friend. You won’t reach your goals by multitasking.
Multi-tasking makes you feel busy, but busy is not the same as productive.
Instead, you need to invest time and energy and focus into deep work.
What is Deep Work?
Cal Newport’s book Deep Work explores all the research behind our brains and productivity and why deep work, or getting into a peak mental zone, is the best mental environment for reaching our goals.
This is why time blocking is so important (we talked about that on day #6). You need to block time into your schedule where you ignore all distractions and work toward your goals with a deep mental focus.
Why is Deep Work Better?
Deep work allows you to produce better results in less time! Doesn’t that sound amazing?
Most of us spend most of our time in a surface level work flow where we are constantly distracted and just dipping our toes into tasks instead of actually working on them.
This is probably why we feel like we get nothing done during the day even though our entire day is busy!
Sure, we’re busy, but we’re not productive.
Action Steps
If you want to spend your days more productively, then try out deep work instead of multi-tasking.
Here are some action steps to get you there:
- Pick up a copy of Cal Newport’s book Deep Work
- Time block specific deep work hours into your schedule
- Choose deep work over multi-tasking for your big goals & tasks
Join us on Day #11 of the 25 Day Productivity Challenge where we’ll talk about how to do a time makeover!
Check out the complete 25 Day Productivity Challenge!
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