Get more stuff done

Most of us have a To-Do list. It’s that group of tasks that stares us in the face every morning. If you’re of a particular bent, you get a thrill out of crossing off those tasks throughout the day. I’m not here to judge you weirdos. Because I, too, get an endorphin rush when knocking out a task.

One of the tricks that has rung true for me is the idea of short sprints. Briefly, you hyper-focus on a specific task for a certain amount of time. Some theories say you need to put your head down for an hour, take a 20-minute break, and then go back to another one. And that’s fine for those that can hyper-focus for an hour. I am not one of those.

The idea of hyper-focusing makes sense. There are plenty of studies that say multi-tasking is a fantasy. A fallacy. A fraudulent farce perpetrated by those trying to sell us To-Do lists in creative calendars. Here are links to some of those studies.

The myths of the digital native and multitaskers

The perils of multitasking

Why your brain hates multitasking

An hour of hyper-focusing sounds like torture. It’s akin to when I was put in the corner as a child. Yup, parents used to do that. Yup, it happened to me.

I came down to 20-minute sprints. For 20 minutes I am hyper-focused on writing, analyzing, or creating. To the exclusion of everything around me, I am focused on this one thing. I use the “Focus” function of my cellphone, turn off notifications, and just get to it. Then, when the 20 minutes are up, take a short break, and then start on the next.

Like any task or project, sometimes it’s going to take you more than 20 minutes to fully complete your thing. That’s all right. No big deal. Either push it off to another time during the day or use your next 20-minute block to get more work done. The idea here is to do some hard, focused work for the time that you think you can focus.

What works for me might work for you. Adjust and create a system that allows you to cross those items off your list. That’s really the point here. If you can do amazing work for 5 minutes, make it 5 minutes. Who cares? If you are making progress and getting the things done throughout your day, no one will really slight you because you broke up the task into 100 different sprints.

Listen to yourself. Your mind, your body. Figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. Experiment with various times and setups. Don’t beat yourself up because you can’t sit down for as long as the guru says you should. You got this.