The Productivity Conundrum: Single Tasking or Multi-Tasking
Single-tasking is generally a good policy as it is simple and you could go never wrong with it. Mindless multi-tasking is stressful and counter-productive, so it is a strict no-no. But…
But then you are wasting some very good opportunities to use your time effectively that you could do with multi-tasking. You should always look for the following multi-tasking opportunities.
- Stressful single-tasking activities: All activities involving agonizing waiting times are great opportunities for multi-tasking. Waiting is always stressful, and engaging your mind with other parallel activities will reduce stress and help get a few things done as a bonus.
Some common examples include your long commutes, slow computer network, or some processing on a computer that takes a long time. Long commutes could be used to listen to audiobooks. Short time slots in front of the computer could be used to do some extra stretching exercises. A parallel work could be taken up if you are setting out for some long processing tasks with intermediate waiting times, such as installing software or restarting your computer for updates.
- Combine two activities where motivation is typically low: You could brisk walk in a non-crowded and familiar place while reading. Physical activity will keep you alert with your reading and your body will get some physical activity, which itself is in short supply nowadays. If it is audiobooks, you have more options to do, such as washing, cutting, and chopping, etc.
- Do a few organizing activities around your main activity while you are at it – It’s a good idea to stay in the context and do few more tasks around your main task, which should help you reduce time in the future. When you are doing a complex task, keep drafting a report or journal or a checklist that could be useful for future reference.
Bookmark useful websites and pages appropriately before moving ahead to the next activity. Maintain a bunch of running lists, such as agenda for the future meetings, writing ideas, reading lists, to-do list, and update them when you get a thought about any additions to them.
It is a good idea to write down the tasks that you are doing in some cases of multi-tasking so that you do not forget about them altogether.
As you see, although single-tasking is the rule, selective multi-tasking could be a bonus.
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(featured image: Photo by Peter Fazekas from Pexels)
Do you buy Commitment Insurance?
Do you buy Commitment Insurance? I am sure, you do not as they don’t sell it yet. Then, better if you do not default on any of your commitments. But how would you guarantee that? There is a way!
Think of these situations:
- You are on phone with your client, and you tell them that you will send the required details ASAP.
- You send an email accepting a speaking assignment that is a month away.
- While you are in the shower you get a wonderful idea of promoting your business.
- You attend a day-long seminar and make copious notes of how you could leverage ideas that you learned during the session.
- A very important person to you casually reveals her date of birth and you make a point to surprise her by wishing her on that day.
- Your mother tells you that she will soon run out of her prescription vitamin supplement.
- Your mentor tells you to read that great article that would solve one of your problems.
- You like an article posted on LinkedIn, by one of your friends and decide to read it later.
- You just returned from travel and wish to send your travel expense report to your accounts department.
- You want to kick off that new ambitious project you were just awarded.
What is the common thread across all these situations? There is an explicit or implicit commitment on your behalf in each of them. Some are in written form; some are oral, and some are just thoughts. Leaving them in those forms is as risky as riding a bike without a helmet on a chaotic street – you are just over-relying on your luck and your skills. Don’t do it. Let’s understand first what the risk is.
You play several roles in your personal and professional life and always want to do justice to each of them. By virtue of it, you are continuously bombarded with expectations from everyone around you and even from yourself. In an ideal world, you would remember all and take appropriate actions at the right time. But the reality is far from it.
When you just rely on your working memory for your commitments, you will soon start missing a few as your working memory can store only a little. You are now left alone at the mercy of reminders from others, which is something you don’t want to rely on.
So, what is the way out? Since we don’t have any way to upgrade our working memory, we will have to take support of external means. But again, a hodgepodge of several notebooks, post-its, and Apps will not help. You need something that is necessary and just sufficient.
The best recommendation here is to have a combo of a calendar and a to-do list! Some of your actions are time-sensitive, they should go to the digital calendar so that you get timely reminders to go do them. While the rest of them should go into a single master to-do list, preferably a digital one, to utilize your time other than what is committed to the calendar events.
This distinction between tasks that go into your calendar versus, those that go into your master to-do list is quite important. You may not want to clutter your calendar with wishful plans, which you may not be able to follow. You would end up snoozing most of them and accumulate tons of unfinished events, which you would hate to replan. At the same time, you may not want to miss adding a time-sensitive task to the calendar, however insignificant it might sound.
Collecting all your commitments into this combo is only half the battle with the other half being a meticulous and frequent review of them to complete the actions. But recording all your commitments is critical as what are the odds that you will do something that you don’t even remember?
Your collection must be 100% if you want to be totally risk-free. You need to start looking at all your sources of work differently. The sources of work could be the project plans of your organization, meeting minutes, phone calls, emails, messages, careless shouts from your spouse, or even your own thoughts. Look at them as commitment machines since they generate commitments on your behalf. Extract those commitments from them and put them outside your head into the combo of Calendar and the master to-do list. Once you are armed with such an inventory of your commitments, you will be able to make the best use of your willpower to complete them.
I am often reminded of a Marathi poem from my school days – Ganpat Vani (गणपत वाणी), by B. S. Mardhekar (बा.सी.मर्ढेकर). The poet portrays a person who always dreamt big but did nothing to pursue it. If you don’t want to be that Ganpat Vani, the first thing you will need is a system that collects and organizes all your goals and actions together.
(Originally published in The Times of India on May 01, 2022)
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Sign and Scan Your Documents Smartly
Nowadays the ink-signed documents are not required in most of our transactions. If you are expected to send just a signed and scanned document, you can do better than ink-signing the document and rush to a scanner machine.
There are many options but what you will like to know are the ones that are easy and free – well, and safe too!
At the risk of stating the obvious, never ever insert an image of your signature in MS Word or Excel documents – not even when you are going to convert it to PDF, as anyone will be able to copy your signature image – even from the PDF. There are online options that require you to upload such a PDF and generate a PDF that emulates a scanned document. They should practically be safe but there is always a doubt about the confidentiality of our document.
Let’s now look at the right ways of doing it. We may have few different scenarios.
(A) You have a touch screen device with a digital pen.
- The source is a Word or Excel document – You should be able to simply sign with the digital pen and print the document as PDF. Don’t forget to choose the color of your signature.
- The source is a PDF document – You might be able to convert the PDF to Word and do the above, but you know it’s messy. Instead, you should go for the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader (free version). Of course, you will not be able to edit the PDF document but Reader App will allow you to sign with the digital pen wherever you want. Look for the “Sign” icon in the toolbar.
(B) If you don’t have a touch screen device, you will be required to create an image of your signature by signing on white paper and scanning it with your smartphone. Once you create a good resolution image of your signature, secure it in a known place so that you don’t have to start from scratch the next time.
- The source is a Word or Excel document – Print it to PDF document and follow the PDF procedure below.
- The source is a PDF document – Adobe Acrobat Reader (free version) provides an option to insert the signature image wherever you want. Look for the “Sign” icon in the toolbar.
Isn’t it quick, safe, and cheap?
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How can one overcome procrastination?
The brilliant meme above by Instachaaz captures the turmoil of people about time management. The Ever Given ship that was stuck in the Suez canal had sparked this idea. Procrastination is the biggest obstacle to personal productivity. Procrastination is real! We are humans and not computers that continue working, once powered on. At the root of any procrastination, there is just one thing – the lack of clarity about the work under question.
The work looks daunting as it is new, and it is so big that you don’t know whether you would ever finish it even if you start now. The answer lies in getting clarity about how to make at least a little progress on the work, without worrying about the whole problem.
Also, sometimes a smoothly running work just stops and does not progress and you start wondering why you are procrastinating to take it up. The reason should always be, again, not knowing a next doable action to make progress on it.
As you get clarity by means of figuring out the first or next doable action, the fear and so the procrastination should go away.
The real hurdle in getting clarity is a natural aversion of our mind to do the slow thinking as it requires the application of deliberate effort and energy. This effort or energy is not as large as one would think, so being conscious about this fact should help one to try.
A nice tool to find suitable doable actions on any work is mind map. A mind map encourages you to do slow thinking. Thus as you build a mind map you get a whole lot of possibilities to make inroads into a seemingly intractable work.
Next time you do procrastination about something, think of getting clarity and proceed to a mind map tool.
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How Frequently Should You Check Your Emails?
You should check your emails (applies to even other sources of communication) through which you get your “work”, regularly, to know what should be on your To-Do list. The “work” here is all that you are responsible for, both on personal and professional fronts.
It always pays to stay current with the entire scope of your work for the best utilization of your time. If you do not know the complete scope of your work, what are the odds that you will choose the right task for a given time slot!
Wait! Did someone tell you to not look at your emails more often? I agree but don’t take the advice blindly. It only meant that you should not break your concentration just to look at every mail that arrived. But there is nothing wrong with looking at emails when you are not into a work that requires concentration or you are into the breaks.
A good practice for processing your sources of communication is to go through the inputs and just note down your actions in your to-do list than actually doing them unless something can be done in less than two minutes. If there is an action of reading articles on the web you would save them in Read-later App than actually reading them at that moment.
Here are the benefits:
- Since you are simply identifying the actions, it should require smaller chunks of time that you get more often and easily.
- Keep processing your sources of communication as often as possible so that you don’t accumulate so many items that make you look for bigger chunks of time that you rarely get.
- Get comfortable with your Email and other relevant Apps so that working with them should be fun. Learn the settings that make you more productive. For example, a useful setting for processing emails is to open the next mail automatically after closing or deleting one. Also, knowing keyboard shortcuts saves time by having your hands always on your keyboard.
- Keep the spirit behind this processing activity in your mind and that should motivate you to do it regularly.
Let me reiterate the spirit: “It always pays to stay current with the entire scope of your work for the best utilization of your time”.
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(featured image: Photo by Torsten Dettlaff from Pexels)
Simple Technique to Manage Your Email Inbox
Email is one of the most misunderstood parts of our working lives. We often treat it as something outside real work. You’ll hear people say, “I had so much work today, I couldn’t check my emails,” as if email were a distraction rather than a conduit. That framing is flawed.
Email is just a communication medium. Anything that lands in your inbox could just as easily have arrived via a message, a meeting, or a quick conversation. The critical point is this: you receive an email because there is already an explicit or implicit commitment involved. Email doesn’t create work—it reveals it.
Most attempts at inbox management fail because they attack symptoms, not the cause. Let me start with a few common approaches that simply don’t work.
One popular method is sampling: picking a few unread emails based on a vague sense of importance, processing them until you feel better, and leaving the rest untouched. One of my colleagues followed this faithfully. When I once asked him for a snapshot of his inboxes, he happily shared it. It was funny—and alarming. He was my direct report, and more than once I had to personally call him to read an email he had never opened.
Another widely practiced approach is reading every unread email, acting on the easy ones, and marking the difficult ones back as unread for later. I followed this method myself for years, so I can say with confidence: it’s unreliable. The inbox slowly turns into a graveyard of postponed decisions.
Then there are overly complex systems—so intricate that you neither fully understand them nor sustain them. Complexity is not sophistication.
From a broader perspective, productivity depends on choosing the right task at the right time in your day. Every hour doesn’t suit every kind of work. Pick the wrong task at the wrong time—doing shallow work when deep focus is needed—and urgent work gets delayed, pushing you into constant firefighting. Ignore important but non-urgent work, and it quietly turns urgent before you realize.
To make sound decisions about what to work on when, you need a complete inventory of your commitments. Email is one of the primary sources of that inventory. Until you process it, you don’t truly know the scope of your work. That’s why email should be seen not as work itself, but as a messenger for something far more critical: commitment management. This applies as much to personal email as it does to professional email—anything that carries an explicit or implicit time commitment matters.
If your goal is calm control over your day and stress-free productivity, this method, which is rooted in the inbox zero method, is not a cosmetic goal; it is a foundational process.
A simple, battle-tested inbox zero technique
I propose a technique I’ve tested repeatedly in the noisy environment of corporate life. I refer to Outlook here, but the principles apply to any email application.
Preparation
- Create a subfolder inside your Inbox called Next Action. This folder holds emails that require more time, context, or energy to process properly.
- Set the folder property to show total number of items so the count is always visible.
- Create a shortcut to this folder in Favorites and remove items you don’t truly care about. I keep only three: Inbox, Drafts, and Next Action.
Note: Be careful to remove only the shortcut from Favorites, not the folder itself.
Act on unread emails immediately
- If an email is not useful, delete it or mark it as spam.
- Unsubscribe aggressively from newsletters that don’t meet your expectations.
- If the implied action is quick, complete it immediately.
- If an email requires a different setting—more time, the right place, or higher energy—copy (not move) it to the Next Action folder and move on.
- Continue until you reach the first magical moment: zero unread emails.
The number shown against the Next Action folder in Favorites acts as a constant, gentle reminder of pending commitments.
Process Next Action separately
- When you have the right time and energy, visit the Next Action folder.
- Process each email thoughtfully.
- Once done, delete it from Next Action (these are copies).
- Reach the second magical moment: zero items in Next Action.
This method is not about a one-time cleanup, but rather a habit. Give yourself a few weeks to internalize this way of working. Once it settles in, your inbox stops being a source of stress and becomes a reliable dashboard of your commitments—and your day starts feeling a lot more under control.
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