7 Tabs and Outlook

At any given moment, my computer has 4 or more tabs open, plus my outlook, and typically an excel spreadsheet. Currently, it is 7 tabs and my outlook.

For some of you, these numbers are low.

This does not include the projects on my desk. I have a pile of invoices, payroll data, dispatch sheets, load confirmations, my calendar, a pile of messages and notes, and a miscellaneous stack of papers. And my cell phone ringer is on.

You might be more organized with your efforts than I am, but most people I talk to in a busy job find themselves here. It provides this false sense of multi-tasking. I say false-sense because I have learned over and over that multi-tasking is somewhat of a myth. You may be doing a lot of things, but you are not necessarily doing any of them well when trying to do too many things.

This is a norm in our culture. Look at the drive-thru window: the person is wearing a mic talking to someone ordering, while pouring a drink for the person at the window, and trying to count the right number of Zaxby’s sauces. Everywhere you look, we build systems requiring multi-tasking.

Of course in this age, we must learn to adapt to this norm to some degree. I need to be available for drivers and my shop staff and customers and my family, so my ringer is on most of the time while working on whatever projects. It is part of the job. The question I have been asking myself is, am I abusing the excuse of multi-tasking?

There are certain projects that would be better suited for focused work, detaching from the inundation of information and demands for my attention. Even more significant, the people in front of me deserve my full attention, not my distracted focus.

I do not have a perfect answer to this. I think my desk will always appear a bit like my mind and my journal: cascades of projects and categories of thoughts that seem cluttered to the outsider. I think my job will always demand my attention is pulled in multiple directions. The guardrail I need to establish is that my focus is a commodity, it is a resource, and I need to make sure it is put in the right places at the right time.

Practically, this means turning my ringer off when meeting with someone 1on1, or for some of you in your context, put it away completely.

This means closing the tabs that do not support the current project.

This means cleaning my desk up to actually be more orgnanized.

Your focus is a resource. Are you stewarding it well, or are you letting circumstances and external influences decide for you where to put it?