Here I am, standing at my standing desk, enjoying the ergonomically efficient set up I’ve got.
I’m comfortable and inspired.
I’m ready to start writing.
The only problem is that my writing tab window is small enough that I’m able to see 14 other windows open, and in various sizes, running the background on my computer.
See, if you had been a fly on the wall (How actually weird is that expression?) what you would have been able to see is this:
I start writing, then I see, out of the corner of my eye, my email notifications, my calendar, my browser tabs (and let’s just say there are a lot of those open at any given time) my Spotify app, and, well, I’ll spare you of the rest…’cause you get the point.
I stop writing and randomly, yet quite predictably, switch between my writing window and those other windows.
Fortunately, I recognize what’s going on fast enough to realize that I need to enter full screen mode.
No. I’m not talking about maximizing my window, I’m talking FULL SCREEN MODE – something I’ll now refer to as FSM to save time.
We humans are, for the most part, cue-response creatures.
Give me a lot of cues that are all vying for my attention and, well, I probably won’t stay focused very long on any one of them.
Minimizing, or eliminating, competing cues allows me to sustain effort on ONE thing at a time.
Researchers have determined that “multi-tasking” doesn’t actually exist – that what’s really going on is task-switching – and that, it actually takes more mental energy to continue to switch from one task to another.
Let’s imagine this guy – George – who sets out to mow his lawn one Saturday afternoon.
While he’s excited to be trying out his shiny new red mower, it’s 98 degrees and humid today, and he just wants to get the task over with ASAP.
Problem is, almost immediately after he pulls the cord and starts the engine, he looks over into his flower bed and sees a weed…
He lets go of the handle, killing the engine, and makes a mad dash over to that weed, pulling it, and feeling a sense of accomplishment.
He heads back over to the mower, pulls the cord, starts the engine, and begins mowing the lawn.
Thirty seconds later…he sees a large stick lying in the driveway. What does he do?
He lets go of the handle once again, killing the engine, and, with quite a sense of urgency, moves toward his new mission of eradicating the driveway of that stick – quite an urgent undertaking, he thinks.
Feeling another small sense of relief to get that done, he heads back to the shiny red mower, pulls the cord, and, much to his frustration, the mower fails to start back up immediately.
So there he is, on a 98 degree, humid Saturday afternoon, pulling the cord over and over and over on this shiny red mower, hoping that he can restart the engine in order to get back to the mowing task.
Vroooooom! It starts! George is back to mowing the lawn again until…(yep, you guessed it) yet again, there’s something he sees that needs to be dealt with right now.
“I wonder what it could be this time?” You might be thinking.
Well, he just couldn’t help but notice some cobwebs that have formed in between one of his birdhouses and the pole on to which it is hung.
I mean, how long can he stand back and watch that happen?
Not one second longer!
So he goes to the garage, gets a long handled broom, heads to the birdhouse, and eliminates those cobwebs.
“Whew,” he says, “Got that done!
Now…what was I doing?
Oh yeah…mowing the lawn!” So he heads back over to his shiny new red mower, pulls the cord, and…
Well, four hours later, as the sun is setting, George realizes he’s just not going to be able to finish cutting the lawn today, so, for the last time today, he lets go of the handle, killing the engine, and proceeds to put the mower away in the shed.
Now, perhaps George is going to finish the lawn mowing task tomorrow.
However, there’s also a pretty high likelihood that he might notice a small patch of dead grass in the lawn, and need to stop in order to make a trip to the hardware store to buy some fertilizer.
Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
With each urgent new task that pops up, George’s attention is being pulled away from what is most important?
With every time he kills the mower, and attempts to restart it minutes/hours later, there is a startup cost. George is using up a lot of fuel – both personal and petroleum fuel – every time he restarts the mower.
By this point, we both might be thinking that George would be much better off entering FSM.
In FSM, he can stay focused only on mowing the lawn until it is completed, stopping only to clear anything that is directly in the path of his lawnmower blade, and, after finishing the lawn, then moving on to pulling the weeds.
What’s most important to you today?
How could you go into FSM on that?
If you’re interested in learning more about what working with me could look like, you can schedule a complimentary consultation with me (via Zoom) by clicking this link.
