Business Insight Zone

Today is the first day of my vacation, though I’m not yet on the road.

Yesterday, then, was the last day before vacation — that famous, horrible day when we try to rectify our obligations to the point where we can leave our work behind for a week or two with a clear head and a clean conscience.

But my desire to do everything at once took over, and I spent much of the day agitated with myself because I was juggling too much to get very many things done.

Although I did accomplish some useful things, I hardly cleared the slate like I wanted to. And although I managed to stay good-humored about it — my work neighbor and I traded jokes about our short attention spans — the sense of dissatisfaction remains.

One can at a time

Part of the problem is my own short attention span, and the various habits with which I manage (or fail to manage) my inbox, my to-list, and so on.

But at least part of the problem comes from the organization of the modern workplace: we mutually create and buy into expectations — spoken or unspoken — that we’ll have our e-mail turned on all the time, that we’re always available and interruptable, that lots of meetings are the norm.

Contrast this to the mountains of research that contradict this way of working. Intense study has shown, among other things, that:

• Multitasking never, ever works — cannot work, neurologically — if you’re talking about doing more than one intellectually demanding thing at a time.
• People do their best, most creative work in the “Flow” state, which requires that they immerse themselves in pools of open-ended time without interruptions.
• U.S. office workers increasingly waste large chunks of their days tending to e-mails rather than actually, you know, getting stuff done.

(For more on these points, see the roundup posts from last week that treat multitasking and the e-mail-driven “Infomania” that saps productivity.)

Cause for hope

I shouldn’t complain too hard: folks at Hoover’s are generally very understanding if you ask them “Do I really need to attend your meeting?” or when you offer to discuss something with them one-on-one instead of in larger (i.e. potentially less fruitful) meetings. In fact, yesterday’s running around included a couple of serendipitous one-on-one talks about a really cool project we’re ginning up — one that I’ll be excited to work on when I get back from my R&R.

Besides that, when I really have my mind set to accomplish a lot during a day, I put on my headphones, crank up the classical music (or, sometimes, the Led Zeppelin), and work uninterrupted for hours. And I have at least a few solid working habits that counter my short attention span: for instance, I’m good about keeping my inbox cleaned out.

The simple solution

Regardless of how tough it may be to implement, the answer to all this at least isn’t hard to express:

DO ONE THING AT A TIME.

Look at your own inbox. It may represent ten cans of worms, or fifty, or a thousand. Regardless of how many problems or crises might lurk there, the solution is the same: Take some rough estimate of which one is best to tackle right now, open up the can, and deal with every worm in it one by one. Discard the can or put it back in the rack where the empty cans go (or whatever else you want to do with this metaphor).

Then — and only then — choose Can #2.

Happy can-opening!

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Related posts:

• How Flow is like a good cup of coffee.
• What if your company outlawed multitasking?
• Multitasking = cognitive hell.

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(Photo by Barefoot in Florida.)