Why I’m Quitting the Rat Race of Multitasking and Email

This will be the first of six posts over the months of October, November, and December where I document my goal for Q4 of focusing on the people I’m with and the task at hand.

My life, like many entrepreneurs, is at the point where I work 24/7. I am constantly in go mode and bang out 10-12 meetings per day. In the month of September, I had almost 200 meetings with clients, prospects, mentees, my team, and general networking.

Oh yeah… and I had my first child (Landon). After being home for a week and working from home most of the following week, I was “forced” to do two things:

1. Not check email constantly for about 8 days
2. Focus on the day and not worry so much about past or future stress

What have I learned?

Email is not that productive – it is actually evil

Email makes us feel good. We complete hundreds of micro-tasks each day and then look up and say, “what did I do today?”

Email forces us to constantly be in trouble shoot mode and spend most of our day executing very tactical, basic decisions instead of engaging in high-value activities. I continue to try to use Asana but find myself going back to the safety blanket of years of email based task management.

NO MORE…

My goal for the next 30 days:

1. 1. • Use Asana exclusively for all tasks – take the extra step and save tasks for later
      • Delegate: If someone else can answer the questions…I’ll let them
      • Stop responding: If an email isn’t asking for an answer, a simple response (or no response) is okay
      • If a topic will require at least two back and forth emails, I’ll pick up the phone

Real life is pretty awesome and I forgot how to be present

Why do we now listen to music while doing everything? Yes, we like music, but to some extent it’s a distraction from what we are doing. Perhaps it lets us power through boring activities, but it’s still a distraction. This is just a small example of the many multi-tasking activities that take a way from our ability to give 100% to the tasks/people in front of us.

What about driving or riding the train? This week, I have turned off the music and tried to focus only on the road, trees, buildings or subway passengers. Shutting down all the distractions of work and previous conversations in my head allowed me to just focus on the details of the journey. It has been a very eye opening experience. Not only have I noticed all the cool new spots I need to visit in my hood and all the amazing people that make NY great, but I have been surprised by how difficult it is to actually shut out the internal conversations and focus on what I am doing.

The little conversations about what happened and will happen have taken over much of my mental space and left little room for what is happening right now. This is not only unnecessary, but adds stress and tension to my current conversations and to others as I am unfocused and not adding as much value as I could to the present moment.

My goal for the next 30 days:

1. 1. • If I start something, finish it before moving on – no switching because of fear of forgetting in particular
      • Drive this same mentality into my company – challenge my team to focus on the task at hand instead of internal distractions
      • When I’m doing something, shut out the noise and focus intensely on the conversation – for example, while writing this I have been tempted to do 6 different other tasks

Each week I will document the struggles and my progress toward these goals. I have been reading quite a bit about patience, and my hope is that adding more patience to my day will allow me to focus on high value activities first, and be okay with not everything being done. My goal by January 1 is to count success not by the quantity of activities, but the quality.

Hopefully by reading about this journey, you will be able to slow down yourself and increase the quality of each of your interactions. Stay tuned and please share your words of advice.