How to Do One Thing at a Time

Do you have trouble doing one thing at a time?

Are you easily distracted from one task by another - and then another?

Isn't it tempting to act as if all the different demands on our time and attention are equally important? To rush around answering the phone, replying to emails, organizing meetings or presentations or shopping lists, talking to this person and then to that person, starting one task and then jumping to another, leaving the first one unfinished - perhaps never to be finished?

It's not so surprising. We love progress, new gadgets, doing things faster, smarter, more easily, all the while staying in touch with everyone all the time. Nobody wants to go back a hundred years.

But.

The toxic brew that makes it hard to do any one thing properly

The ping ping ping of new email arriving, the insistent tone of the phone calling to you, the looming deadlines on your calendar, the social pressure to be seen to be in control of it all and perfectly able to do everything come together in a toxic brew. A brew that actually makes it hard to do anything properly.

You might be extremely 'busy', but what exactly are you getting done in this frenzy of half-started activities? Do you beat yourself up for being so bad at multi-tasking? If so, please stop. Research shows that as we increase the number of things we’re focusing on, it can create bottleneck in our attention which blocks us from being able to make decisions, make creative leaps and focus on the important stuff.⁽¹⁾

But it gets worse. More recent research found that constant media multi-tasking seems to be shrinking areas of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control.⁽²⁾

But it's not so easy to stop acting like this if you have been doing it for a long time. After all, it feels 'normal' to be rushing about trying to do everything, and it feels strange and unfamiliar to just keep your attention fixed on one task for a sustained period of time. It's almost as if you've forgotten how to concentrate!

So how can you get back control - real control, that allows you to focus on what needs to be done until it's done?

Retrain your brain to focus on one thing with hypnosis

Do one thing at a time is an audio hypnosis session that will help you quickly reclaim your natural ability to concentrate fully and deeply on what you are doing.

As you relax and listen repeatedly to your download, you'll notice that you:

• start to feel as if a load has fallen from your shoulders (it has!)
• begin to get a new perspective on the relative importance of different tasks and commitments
• start making very specific changes in how you organize your life so you can use your time really productively
• think much more deeply and fully about the tasks you give your time to
• say 'no' much more readily to distractions and interruptions
• have a much greater sense of achievement at the end of your day

Download Do one thing at a time and give yourself that crucial edge of effectiveness.

References:

1. Tombu MN, Asplund CL, Dux PE, Godwin D, Martin JW, Marois R. A Unified attentional bottleneck in the human brain. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Aug 16;108(33):13426-31. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1103583108. Epub 2011 Aug 8. PMID: 21825137; PMCID: PMC3158154.
2. Loh KK, Kanai R (2014) Higher Media Multi-Tasking Activity Is Associated with Smaller Gray-Matter Density in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex. PLOS ONE 9(9): e106698.