Monotasking vs Multitasking, Schedule vs Calendar

Hello. Welcome to Daily(ish) for Wednesday, October 19. It's, zero degrees, feels like minus three degrees Celsius because winter is stupid. This episode of Daily(ish) is brought to you by Feed Press. Feed.press/dailyish is where you can go to sign up and try out.

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Feed.press/dailyish and also by Patreon supporters like you, patreon.com/ichris. It's where you can go to check out awesome stuff like videos of me talking to you just like you're listening, but, you get the visual version of it sometimes when I'm motivated to do video and have the time and or need the distraction from other things that I should be doing like work, like shoveling the driveway, although we haven't had to actually do that yet. So luckily, that's not happening quite yet, but, those kinds of things. So I'm doing I'm talking fast because I'm in a hurry trying to get this done because I'm gonna go work at Starbucks to get out the house for a change. I've realized with the cold weather, I've kind of hermited, turtled, whatever, dug down, hibernated in the in the house for the last few weeks basically and haven't gone out, aside from a couple meetings.

And so just, dropped the kids off school, go to the Starbucks for a bit, with the the old laptop, the old slow laptop. Then the other thing is like using this newer newish iMac makes me not wanna go use my old laptop because the screen isn't retina and it's slower and it's smaller and and there's smelly people and all those kinds of things. But today I'm gonna get out. Just do it. And I was also kind of inspired by reading an article which I'll link to in the show notes, from the New York Times.

This kind of thing kind of comes around every so often about the whole idea of focusing on one task as opposed to multitasking which was kind of like the mantra of like at least when I was a few years ago when I was working at the university, it was kind of like the big deal of you know multitasking. Have multiple monitors going and all that kind of stuff and you can have your email open and your thing open over here in your WordPress and your Excel sheet and your quarterly projections and whatever all open and you're working on all of them all at the same time and and a lot of research you know has shown that really you don't get more done, get less done and in effect it's definitely less efficient work that you're doing on each thing and so, it's something that I've been kind of trying to do and and like I've said before when I'm editing podcasts which is you know maybe half of my business right now or whatever, it's really hard to do much else anyways because I have to pay attention to what people are saying and listening for edit points and and things like that or taking notes for people for their podcast.

So it's really hard to do anything other than, monotasking or one tasking, single tasking, unitasking. These are all things that it's called apparently. And so but in intentionally with other things now, I'm trying to focus a little more, be a little more intentional with my time because I've realized as the podcasting stuff has taken over, which is kind of is where I wanna go, it has its own like basically set routines of I know that Monday morning I'm doing this podcast, I know that Thursday I'm doing this one, Friday I'm doing this one, and so I can schedule my week a little more specifically intentionally around those kinds of things, whereas in the past it was kind of as projects came up I would just kind of shuffle things around and and get things done as I needed to do. So right now using just like a Excel spreadsheet or a good stuff or good stuff Google, We're almost basically on par with Google, so that's why I just get those two confused. But, a Google Sheets template for just like a weekly schedule and just sort of right now filling in for almost for the week as it happens so I can sort of see then next week.

Okay. This is what it probably will look like, and so you know adjust as needed or whatever. And and it's something I really struggle with because I I'm much more like I don't like being told what to do with my time even if it's myself. I don't like having to figure out in advance. I don't like planning.

These are all things I don't like. I do them if it's part of my job imposed by someone, a boss or whatever, but when it's my own boss, I'm my own boss, then it definitely gets pushed way down the list of things to do, and I just sort of react rather than do a a prepared advance plan. And so that's where I'm at and that's maybe a little bit why I've neglected Daily(ish) this last week, but looking at the schedule and sort of like where things plan when I actually map out the amount of time it should take me to do different things, it's amazing how much extra time there actually should be. So it shouldn't be that big a deal to schedule a half hour Tuesdays and Thursdays, let's say, do daily ish or or even a Show Me Your Mic episode or whatever if I want trying to bring that back, that show back. It shouldn't be that difficult to do.

So we'll see. This is the, optimism side of it. In a few days, I might record a pessimistic side of the equation. I've been looking for a good like digital. I wanted a digital.

I hate having a paper one because it gets left somewhere, but a digital calendar almost but not a calendar like a schedule thing but it's basically looks like a calendar. So I don't wanna use like Apple's calendar app or Google's calendar. Although I thought thought about using just setting up a standalone calendar that's not tied to like reminders and dates because I don't want necessarily reminders of starting things or or things like that but just kind of like to schedule out the week and then be able to move things around but it's reoccurring like every Monday I'm gonna always do this and and stuff like that but I don't have to deal with the reoccurring reminders and all that stuff that generally comes with calendars and so like I said I've been trying this Google Sheet spreadsheet. A friend on Twitter mentioned any do, any dot any dot do is a one that's kind of like plans out your next day at least and then someday list kind of thing, which I have a bit of that sort of already going on in Trello for like lists of like ideas and things need to get done at some point, but it's not like a schedule per se.

So if you have any tips, anything that you suggest, I I'd be curious to hear what you use. And not that I'm I don't think it's wrong to use say paper lists or calendars or things like that for scheduling. It just doesn't work for me. So I know friends of mine who swear by having carrying around a big huge calendar book and and nothing digital, but that's just not me. So anyways, gotta go.

Hope you have a great day. Thanks for listening. Visit, v.press/dailyish and or patreon.com/ichris. Talk to you later. Bye.