How many times have you finished a two hour work session only to wonder what you’ve accomplished? You remember starting out on a project and before you were done you were on something completely different. Worse, the job you started out to do is still undone. I know how frustrating this can be because I’ve done it countless times myself. I have found a way to combat this and I’d like to share it with you.

Multi-Tasking Is A Myth

First of all, let me disabuse you of the notion that so-called “multi-tasking” really accomplishes anything. Studies have already found that people who think they are working on five things at once are not doing any of them any favors. Usually, the whole system perpetuates having to revisit and revisit and revisit projects that could have been completed in a small fraction of the time. All the person needed to do was quit deluding themselves into believing more activity equals more accomplishment.

It simply isn’t so.

My honest opinion is the multi-tasking myth was created by people who had a ton of stuff to do but were too overwhelmed to start any of it. So, they made themselves feel like they were accomplishing something by getting in the middle of as much stuff as they could. In the end, all of it suffered including the human.

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We All Do It

We’ve all got friends that we “know” have it made.  They’ve been working in the same field they graduated college with a degree in for years.  We’re “sure” they have their retirements almost set and their investments all in a row.  When they retire, they’re going to travel the world and move from one beautiful place to another until they’re too old to travel.  Then, they’ll just stay in whatever country they find themselves in, right?

Is this reality?  My point here is what if it is?  What difference should that make to us.  Other than using this fiction we create to make ourselves feel inferior or lesser in some way how does this help us?

It doesn’t.

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In this post on Timothy Ferriss’ blog titled “How To Never Forget Anything Again”, written by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, the author talks about how our minds are not really very good at remembering a lot of things. His focus is on finding a system to help us retain this information by setting up a system. This system must cover different aspects of our lives and be easy enough to become a daily habit. After all, any tool we don’t like using we won’t. That’s just human nature.

Here are the applications the author recommends and their uses:

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