I asked the people who want to motivate themselves whether they are trying to do now is one or more. 65% of them answered they have more than one. However, it is difficult to execute multiple tasks at once. You should think it is impossible unless you are familiar with the tasks by experiencing those tasks over and over again.
For example, experts with good cooking skill can run multiple cooking tasks simultaneously. While heating the material with fire, they can wash the chopping board used to cut the material and prepare a dish to serve the heated material.
However, people who just started learning cooking cannot. Experts understand the length of time to heat the material and the length of time to wash the chopping board. So they can judge that they can wash the chopping boards during the wait time to heat the materials. People who just started learning do not know the lengths. They can not make the judgment. So they can not do parallel processing.
Even when it seems that we do multiple tasks in parallel, we do only one task at each moment. We switch the target task rapidly. The switching cost is not zero. Executing multiple tasks in parallel has an additional task: the decision of task switching. The cost of switching is low for experts, high for novices. If you are trying to do more than one task and you are not motivated, let’s focus on one thing first and finish them one by one.
- (2.1.1) grasp the overall picture first to choose one task
- (2.1.2) Getting Things Done: Collect all first
- (2.1.3) Collect all and then process them
- (2.1.4) How to choose one task