Taking Things One At A Time
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I use to be a TV junkie and one of my favorite shows was “The West Wing”, I absolutely loved that show! I remember my favorite episode, which was about one of the characters (Josh) running the presidential campaign of a new candidate (Matt Santos), a relatively unknown candidate.
As you can imagine, running a presidential campaign even for an unknown candidate can be crazy busy. In the episode, Josh had two cells that were either constantly ringing or beeping from text and email alerts.
He had meetings schedule every three minutes (it seemed like it) not to mention, interviews, strategy and the occasional major crisis, his day was never-ending! I saw this episode and was convinced this was how I wanted my life to be, I wanted to be that busy (I now realize how stupid that sounds).
So even though I was watching a TV show, I went on to try to be as busy as Josh was. I would take on all kinds of projects at work; I would take on all kinds of side projects at home. I actually went out and bought two cell phones, I pretty much lost my mind.
I’m going to make a long story short and tell you that I completely chased and burned, I didn’t get a single thing accomplished. Do you know why that is?
Life is not a TV show.
I’m now in a position where I’m actually very busy: between traveling literally all over the world to speak at conferences, editing my book with my publisher, writing three blog posts a week, writing a monthly column for a magazine, writing as a contributing writer for godlywriters.com, writing my third book, coaching clients, consulting companies on their social marketing strategies and I still have my day job!!!
Sometimes I want to pull my hair out, in a good way 
Thinking back to that TV episode and what I tried to do afterward and how things are now, have made me realize one thing: Multi-tasking doesn’t really work.
When I try to do more than one project at a time, can you guess what happens? That’s right, I only get a little of everything done, but nothing actually accomplished. Maybe you’re better then me, but I’m guessing you’re fooling yourself if you think you’re good at multi-tasking.
Smarter people than I have written detailed posts about how much better and how much more you get accomplished when you do one task at a time. Doesn’t it just make sense?
Dave Ramsey bases a big part of his strategy of getting people out of debt off of this principle: the power of focused intensity. This means that you focus on one debt (you start with the smallest) at a time until they’re all gone. The point is you actually get something accomplished and you get ether from accomplishing it.
So if you aren’t getting things accomplish like you want and need to, maybe it’s time to reassess how you’ve been going about it. We all have very busy lives and if we want a chance of knocking things off of our to-do list, we have to do them one at a time. Try it and see if it works…….
What strategy do you use to get things accomplished?
