5 Ways to Break Your Multitasking Habit

These are things I personally do, to help me break my multitasking habit and cultivate deeper focus. If you have other ideas, please offer them in the comments to this post. I would love to hear them.

1. Meditate

Meditation is the psychic equivalent of swinging kettlebells for the mind.
It makes you more robust intellectually, and closes the gap between what you know needs to happen deep down in your heart, and what actually gets done.

The benefits of meditation are too widespread to ignore. Even better, you don’t need any special equipment or tools to get started. All you need is a quiet space and a few minutes of time.

A consistent meditation practice will support your cultivation of two things:

1. Awareness
2. Objectivity

This means that with practice you will begin to notice more of what is happening in your world (expanded awareness) while at the same time improving your capacity to be non-attached to those very things (increased objectivity).

A practitioner of meditation will not necessarily feel less temptation or distraction during the rest of life, however, they will begin to build up a capacity to choose whether to follow the temptation towards distraction or just allow it to pass by.

If you ever notice a seemingly invisible force compelling you to check your phone for messages, a force that is so sinister and stealth that you don’t even see you are responding to it’s every whim — this is exactly the type of energy that meditation will make you aware of. You may then choose to engage with it, or not.

In my experience, the more you meditate, the easier it is to say “NO!” to distraction and say “YES” to deep and meaningful experiences.

2. Actively Concentrate

This is one of my favorite practices, and in fact, I applied it recently during a 3-hour power hike on the Colorado Trail with my dog.
With active concentration (I made the name up, not sure what else to call it), you pick a particular problem or topic that matters to you. This might be a project you are working on at work or something else altogether. It’s a riff on moving meditation practices that have been part of Buddhist traditions for ages.

While going on a walk, slow jog, swim or otherwise engaging in a low-intensity activity, focus on your topic for the duration of the exercise. Think about the problem in new ways. Imagine different scenarios. Imagine the problem was an intricate and fascinating rock you were turning over and inspecting with an imaginary microscope in your mind. Mull over the problem well, then, ignore the problem and come back to it in a few minutes.

See what pops.

For example, I outlined this entire blog post in my mind during my recent hike, including the examples and some potential statistics I wanted to include. When I returned home, I then wrote an outline (using pen and paper) and typed everything out (using the Byword app on my Macbook Pro), looked up a few stats, and published to my blog, Medium.com, and LinkedIn.

Active concentration works for any period of time, though I find it extremely useful for extended periods (2+ hours) when I can mull problems over and get a workout at the same time. The key thing is to keep the intensity of the exercise relatively low.

3. Schedule Distractions

There are some people, like Cal, who choose to be completely disconnected from Social Media, for the sake of utilizing that time for more meaningful work. I appreciate the choice Cal and other anti-social-networkers make.
However, I’m not one of those people.

I want to stay connected to the world, and to my family members and friends who use social media, messaging and email to keep in touch. My business, as an entrepreneur, also depends on my capacity to use media to connect with current and new clients. I prefer to train my brain to use these tools for my benefit, instead of removing them wholesale from my life.

Besides, in 10 years, when my nieces and nephew are older and embracing technology, I don’t want to seem like a Luddite!
A highly efficient method for dealing with distracting things is to create dedicated time to be distracted. For example, you might decide to check your email at 10 am and 5 pm every day instead of constantly throughout the day.

One thing I do is only “mindlessly browse” my social networks at certain times of the day for 15 or 30 minute time chunks. During these times I can go wild and do whatever I want on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites. The rest of the time, I ignore them or only check them when I have an explicit purpose(e.g. to post an article to Medium or respond to a message on LinkedIn).

I also have removed all my social media apps and disabled all notifications (including email) on my phone.

No one is going to die if I don’t check Facebook every day, so I don’t. The world will keep turning if I don’t hit inbox zero multiple times a day, so I don’t worry about it.

4. Capture Your Monkey Mind

I’ve recently gotten in the habit of writing morning pages. This practice, popularized by creative genius Julia Cameron, involves writing three stream of consciousness pages first thing in the morning, with pen and paper. 

This practice captures your monkey mind before it has a chance to play havoc with your day. It also turns on your inner creativity and productivity before the world deluges you with inputs and useless information.

I always end my morning pages routine feeling more focused and capable of doing great work. Even better, regardless of whether or not I do anything else worthwhile during the day, I have an early “win” to feel good about!

I modify my morning page practice by setting my goal even lower, instead of writing three pages, I aim to write just a single page. Often, when I make it to the end of the first page of my legal pad, the ideas are flowing strong and I end up cruising through 2–3 more pages. I don’t think about what I want to write about ahead of time. I just start moving my pen, often beginning the exercise with “I don’t know what to write about, so I’m moving my pen across the page and seeing what happens…..”.

Something always comes out. Most of the time it’s interesting enough to put up on my blog with minimal edits.

5. Protect Your Quality Time

When do you do your best knowledge work?

For me, it’s in the morning, between 5:00–8:00am. While I don’t always get up at 5am, I’m certainly up before 6 am, and writing or thinking about something meaningful by 6:30.

I take the time before 8 am very seriously. I don’t schedule client meetings before 8am. I don’t turn on the TV before 8am. I don’t play music before 8am. I sit around, drink a hot beverage (tea or coffee), write, plan my day, write some more, let the dog out, write some more, stare out the window, write some more. Sometimes I write less and think more. It depends on the day.

My writing and thinking always revolves around my vocation, which is about helping people build careers and lives they can be proud of. Usually I have a particular topic I’m working through, inspired by a recent conversation I’ve had with a client.

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