Stop doing this (task hopping) and you’ll thank me

Updated to Business on January 22, 2023.

I teach productivity. I don’t like to call it that. It’s the same with most motivational speakers. They prefer to say they talk on “leadership”, or “personal mastery”, but really it’s motivation. For me, it’s productivity.

And one trick has been trumping all the rest lately. I think it’s a game changer.

First, the problem.

When you switch to a new task you satisfied your curiosity, but stymied your results. Put another way, flitting from writing, to email, back to writing, to looking something up on Google, to FaceBook, back to writing, and then on to Twitter, is a recipe for mental potpourri.

TASK HOPPING

I’m not talking about multi-tasking – although it’s still felon #1 – I’m talking about task hopping.

Some research (don’t ask me where I found this gem) claims that task hopping can cost you a loss of 25% of productivity.

This is one of my weaknesses. I get off a phone call, move on to some new task, and then another and then, hours later (sometimes days later), realize I haven’t recorded what I committed to working on. I did that just yesterday after an important client call. Scary!

START BY NOTICING

The solution to task hopping is pretty simple: stop doing it. Good luck with that.

The actual approach I use always starts with noticing. Call it benchmarking, current reality check-in, or just a good laugh, noticing your behaviour and patterns is where you have to start.

Pick just a couple of hours, say tomorrow morning. And notice when you leave a half-finished task to hop to another. I think you’ll be surprised how frequently this happens.

Here’s what I bet you’ll notice:

you are guilty. We all are. Task hopping is fun. You get to titillate your mind by channel surfing your tasks. Who cares that you aren’t finishing anything – this is fun!
you are most likely to task hop when you have hard work in front of you. There you are facing an overdue, half-baked proposal when your email alert pops up. Time to hop!
by giving a little attention to what you are doing and you do it less. It’s like presenting at Toastmasters, everyone says “umm” a lot less.

Following Charles Duhigg’s four-step recipe (The Power of Habit) for changing a habit, we (1) identified the “cue” (I task hop when I have tough work to do), (2) recognized the reward (ex-lax for my brain).

Next, we need to (3) invent a new routine and (4) “reward” it.

NEW ROUTINE

The next step is relatively easy. At the moment of temptation, stop.

There is a moment when you consciously allow yourself to be tempted. A thought will flit through your frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex that says something like “Oh, that’s interesting…” At that point you need to recognize what’s happening.

You are going down a slippery slope (cue, reward) that will steal ten minutes from the more-important work and leave you feeling distracted, frustrated, and even a bit guilty. Not good.

The trick is to catch yourself. Say “No, thanks”, make a note and turn your head back to what you are doing.

WHAT I NOTICED

I did that this morning.

I was working on this blog (which has to be finished today) and here’s what got my attention:

I need to book a flight to the Social Media Marketing World conference – I should email my brother first about a visit in L.A. afterwards.
I’m reminded I want to write a blog about Duhigg’s book – I should note that in Evernote.
I like writing in Mac Pages, but I wonder how that comments feature works – maybe I should look that up.
I’m going to Yoga later – I should check their schedule.
I haven’t heard back from a bureau rep. I work with – I should follow up.

And that was all in five minutes!

The new routine, is I say “No, thanks”, make a quick note on my Day List and turn back to the blog. Easy peasy – less stress and better results.

REWARD IT

Here’s the kicker. Nothing happens without a reward.

Once you commit to the new “No, thanks”, make a note routine you need to reward it. The simplest reward is completion. As I write this I am about 10 minutes away from shipping this blog. That feels great.

Start your task with a reward in mind and then use that as your tease to keep returning to the work. Here are some other rewards I use:

a quick walking break to stretch out and re-energize.
allow myself some “play” time to enjoy a low-value task, like catching up on reading favourite blogs.
take five minutes and clean up the paper, files, and junk on my desk (that makes me feel seriously in charge).
brew some tea and quietly write in my journal for a few minutes.

Your reward doesn’t have to always be a big deal – it just has to be bigger than the reward that the task hopping would have given you.

LAUNCH

When I’m on stage talking about productivity I can’t go into this much detail. But here I have the chance to drill down a bit deeper. But, here’s the thing.

Although what I’m writing about is minor, compared to say, China landing on the moon. It’s huge over time. If you task hop throughout the day, each time you could be distracting yourself for, say five minutes. Let’s suppose this happens 20 times a day. Okay, now you are at 100 minutes, or about 10 weeks a year (10 minutes/day equals about one week a year, based on a 40 hour workweek and working 50 weeks a year). Cripes! I hope that’s enough motivation to spend a few minutes just noticing.