So my Challenge: Mono-Uni-Task! (it’s like “Grease!”) has taken a bit of a slip. I found myself with my brain hurting on Thursday & Friday, being curt with others as I was unable to talk and ensure that everything I had to do would stay in my head. I found myself reacting – when an email came in, I clicked off what I was doing and read it; when the phone rang, I dropped what I was doing and answered it; when my IM started blinking I immediately opened it. I realized that Reacting was my enemy! If Challenge: Mono-Uni-Task was a blockbuster, than The Reactor was the villain & “making me look” was his specialty weapon.

I feel like I’m back at square one, except I know that I can keep the multi-tasking at bay if I set my mind to it. The first few days were a breeze! So, what changed?

Well, I forgot about Challenge: Mono-Unti-Task! OK, maybe not forgot, but I certainly became less conscious (or even entirely unconscious) about it when I thought I got a handle on things. It turns out that having a handle on things for a entire 3 days does not make an ingrained habit go away. Wiki Q&A says that it takes a full month of changing your behavior – and “consciously be(ing) aware” of that behavior – before it’s “gone”. It’s hard for me to even think it’s that easy (30 days doesn’t seem like a long time), but that method is backed up by Steve Pavlina, who’s super smart and stuff.

So, it won’t do me any good to just commit to not multi-tasking. I must commit to being aware that I will not multi-task. You can be sure that on July 29th this blog will either prove or disprove the 30 day theory!

Tags: Powerful Productivity

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Happy Hooplah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.