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Tabs don’t do you any good!

Tabs really don’t do you any good. I am not referring to betting tabs but browser tabs for productivity. Although, thinking about it now, both of them don’t do you any good. Recently, I ended up closing nearly 70 tabs I had for well over a month now. Till a couple of days back, I was a strong believer of Multi-Tasking. I’ve read articles where they talked about people multi-tasking to get a whole lot of work done. Then, I had time to sit down and think about things. I realised, our minds are not capable of multi-tasking although devices now support that. I know iPad has a multitasking feature which allows you to watch a video while jotting down some notes on the side.

While this is great for note taking, it probably isn’t so good when trying to complete a lot of things on time. You see, our minds are capable of splitting attention only one way. I don’t think we are wired to think two thought lines at the same time. You can concentrate and give your attention only to one thing at a time. While our brains are capable of switching tasks in milliseconds which make it look like we’re multitasking. Productivity, I believe, doesn’t have an impact from this. I had those browser tabs for a very long period. I realised that each day, my browser continues to keep them open, and I continue to think I will get to it sooner or later.

Then, on a very fine day, I went on a rampage. I decided to quit or close all the browser tabs and start a text document. In that text document, I noted down what the task was and pasted the links below those tasks. Now, I just go through each task, prioritise them, and start finishing those tasks. Once I am done, I just delete those tasks off from that text document. It’s a funny story because although we have a really good project management software we use at our company, I barely get to using it effectively (especially jotting down some quick tasks like sending an email to a specific person). I feel like it would probably waste my time even more if I note it down as a task because it only takes a few seconds to carry it out.

Hopefully, this will come in handy to those who are still going by that false belief that makes you think you will achieve a lot by multi-tasking. Start with a task and complete it. Don’t start on new tasks until you’ve got the task you’re on finished.

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