50 Lil' Habits: Timed Single-Task
Everything improves when you allow yourself to focus.
Our "go big or go home" culture has left many people feeling overwhelmed, stuck, and gloomy, when all it takes is a lil’ action to turn things around.
Want to try out a new daily habit? I've got a few suggestions.
Here's one:
Work distraction-free on one task for a designated period of time.
Multi-tasking sucks. Leaping from task to task prevents focus, causing each task to take nearly twice as long to complete and with diminished results, which of course then leads to emotional and mental distress. It’s not only a poor use of our time and energy, it’s bad for our bodies and minds.
My best stuff comes from uninterrupted deep-focus work.
Focused work can increase your presence and enjoyment during the task as well as produce feel-good neurochemicals.
“Regardless of the culture, regardless of education, there are seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: You know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian-American psychologist who recognized and named the psychological concept of "flow"
Single-tasking is choosing to focus on one task through completion. You can choose a mission task (e.g., cleaning the kitchen) or a function task (e.g., writing), but the point is to stay focused on that task until you are done. One way to determine completion is to make it a timed task.
I use the Pomodoro technique when I single-task, so much so that I consider them one and the same. The Pomodoro technique is simply setting a timer to focus on a single task. The amount of time is based on your optimal attention span – if you don’t know what that is, you can experiment. I usually go with 20-minute pomodoros for everything from writing to daily chores, and when I begin a lil’ habit, I’ll go with a frictionless 5-minutes.
You’ll want to create a distraction-free environment (remove temptations and devices, silent your alerts, notifications, and pings) and set your timer. Once it begins, stay on task and allow your mind to go deep into the flow state. When the timer goes off, take a 5-minute break and then repeat.
The goal is to give yourself the opportunity to focus and process for a sustained period and then actively rest your brain.
This is a skill you can develop!