Commit to actually achieving a few of your ambitions, rather than wallowing in fantasies of one day achieving them all The result isn’t merely that you make a smaller amount of progress on a larger number of fronts it’s that you make less progress overall. So when a task feels difficult or scary – as tasks that matter often do – you can just bounce off to another one instead. Worse, each activity becomes a way of avoiding every other activity. For a start, plenty of research testifies to the costs of “task-switching”: when you flit between activities, you waste time and energy regaining a state of focus again and again. And when you think your life’s a mess – you should be exercising more, sorting out your finances, improving your relationship with your kids, and on and on – it’s similarly reassuring to feel you’re tackling all those critical issues, not just one.īut the feeling is deceptive. When you’re drowning in to-dos, it’s calming to feel that you’re addressing lots of them simultaneously. One main reason this is harder than it looks is that doing several things at once is usually a way of assuaging anxiety. The single most effective ingredient for a happier and more meaningful 2021 is the exact opposite: to improve your capacity for doing only one thing at a time. At new year, it often takes an additional form: the desire to implement a total life makeover, sorting out your work backlog and your relationship issues, your health and your home repairs all at once.
But for a variety of reasons – overwork, digital distraction, plus the boundary-blurring consequences of the pandemic – it’s probably never been worse. T he urge to do too many things at once is nothing new: as long ago as 1887, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was bemoaning the way “one thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market”.