Your Organizing Coach

Starting Somewhere

Starting is hard. It means going from a standstill into some useful activity that you may not feel confident about doing. Once you have started, though, it’s much easier to continue. That’s why I have a bunch of tricks for just getting started, any which way.

One typical problem people have is that everything they need to do seems equally important. Here are a few ways to handle it.

• Assign each task a number from 1 through X (whatever the total is) randomly. Then do the tasks in that order.
• Another, more fun, way is to write each one on a separate index cards and then shuffle the deck. Turn over a card and do that task. Keep going till you’re done.

If you realize when you do this that all the tasks are actually not equally important, feel free to reorder them. Sometimes you don’t know which is most important, or which is least important, until you put them in some kind of order.

It’s easier to make decisions like this when you get it all down on paper. When it’s just in your head, it’s too vague, too unreal. Writing down a list of tasks gets you to think more concretely about them.

What if you’re still not sure about the order you’ve chosen? Just get going. Even if you get to a point where you have to stop and do something else that, it turns out, has to be completed first, you’ll probably be farther along than if you tried to figure it all out in your head first.

Multi-tasking: Yea or Nay?

Ah, the debate over multi-tasking continues to rage. Is it productive? Or is that speed an illusion of productivity? Is it required for success in business today, or is it just kind of addictive? In his daily roundup of relevant articles, Michael Sampson includes one from Inc.com about this activity.

First, let’s define multi-tasking. Literally, I say it means doing two or more things at once, such as responding to email while talking on the phone and listening to a conference call on mute. A more conservative definition is moving on to another task before the first one is completed.

I am generally against the first kind of multi-tasking, unless you are clear that only one of the tasks, at any given point in time, is being done well (and if the person you’re talking to doesn’t mind that you don’t hear half of what he’s saying).

The second variety can work quite well. Again, there’s a semantic issue. Are we talking about switching tasks every 20 seconds or every 20 minutes? It also depends on what kind of work you do. Not everyone spends the day writing in-depth reports. Work can be a barrage of rapid fire tasks.

I stand by my opinion that some multi-tasking is unnecessary. People do it because they like the rush. They crave the fast pace. If your boss is that kind of person and you're not, whoa, you could be in trouble.

The question of whether or not multi-tasking is a good idea is less important than asking how it’s being done. If multi-tasking sucks you away from important-but-not-urgent work into urgent-but-not-important work, it’s not so productive. However, if you can quickly weigh alternatives and reprioritize on your feet, I think it’s a valuable skill.

Bottom line: take a moment to consider whether the next task is the most valuable use of your time right now. Once you do that consistently, you can multi-task to your heart’s content.