In today’s hyper-connected world, multitasking has been hailed as a necessary skill.
The ability to juggle multiple tasks at once is often worn as a badge of honour.
But what if this cultural norm is costing you your productivity, especially as an author?
What if the secret to extraordinary results lies in how narrow you can make your focus?
Multitasking: The Illusion of Productivity
When you multitask, you divide your attention among different tasks.
This constant shifting means you’re not giving your full concentration to any single job, leading to lower-quality output.
Every time you switch between tasks, your brain needs to adjust.
These adjustments, while seemingly minor, accumulate and deplete your mental resources, leaving you drained and less productive.
Focused Productivity: A Paradigm Shift
When you focus on one task at a time, you can delve deeper into it, enriching your work’s quality—be it a chapter, character development, or plotline—and ultimately, your reader’s experience.
Focused work allows you to enter a state of flow more easily, wherein tasks seem to complete themselves and work becomes a joy, not a chore.
Tips for Focused Productivity
Prioritise: Identify the tasks that align with your ultimate goals. Work on them in a dedicated manner, eliminating distractions and lower-priority jobs that can wait.
Time Blocking: Allocate specific blocks of time to individual tasks and stick to these. Time blocking helps eliminate the temptation to multitask and provides structured intervals for focused work.
Practice Mindfulness: Being mindful allows you to become aware of distractions before they pull you away from your task. Take a deep breath and bring your focus back to your work.
Limit Communication Channels: Whether it’s social media, emails, or text messages, try to limit checking these to specific times in the day. Continuous notifications can be the death of focused work.
Have you ever felt like you’re busy all the time but not making significant progress? How do you plan to change your approach to work for better focus and productivity?
Let’s talk about this in the comments.
CherryEdits 
Thank you for this brief but encouraging article. I’ve definitely found all this to be true — why were my first few books so much easier to write? Because I was far less distracted. Fewer irons in the fire meant I was able to sit down and write everyday, picking up where I had left off the full day before. I was completely immersed in my characters’ lives.
It applies to the things we do outside of our lives as writers as well. I’ve found that I am spread too thin, busy doing other non-essential things that I love, but at the expense of the activity I love most. I’ve finally resolved to reorder my priorities. Can’t wait to see what a difference it makes in my writing!
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You’re welcome. I find I do my best creative work before anything else. If I try to do marketing, check emails, or do other admin tasks before writing, the words don’t flow the same. And even though we all have our rhythms and ways of working, switching back and forth between tasks doesn’t help with the deep focus we need to do our best work.
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And if you’ve not heard of it, look up The Eisenhower Matrix. It was a game-changer for me!
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