As you’ll know if you read my blog, I’ve got a thing about multi-tasking – I think it’s a dangerous myth, and I’ll post anything I find to keep debunking it. Here’s another, though from an unusual angle: Meet the supertaskers (Psychology Today), describes a very small group of outliers, people who can actually deal with too much at once, and are great at it: supertaskers. But the take-home point is this: they do it by learning what to ignore. And if you want to get better at doing that, the way to practice is by focusing on a single task, and learning to ignore distractions ruthlessly. Well worth turning off the distractions and reading the article.
This ties in nicely with another recent article from The Atlantic – ‘How not to try‘, which discusses the curious and perplexing conundrum that trying too hard to do something distracts you from actually doing it. Learning to somehow ignore your own effort is the key to finding the focus you need.
