In today’s wired and gadget filled world, we are increasingly expected, and sometimes obliged, to carry out tasks simultaneously. On one level, there are distinct advantages in carrying out tasks simultaneously, but it has to be done in the right fashion. The longest way to carry out a complex series of tasks is to only start and complete one task at a time. For example, if you want to make a cup of tea, the longest way to do it would be to prepare the mug, prepare the teabag, fill the kettle, boil the water, poor the water, let the tea brew, remove the teabag, get the milk from the fridge, poor the milk, return the milk and then drink. A quicker way would be to fill the kettle first, then boil the water. Whilst waiting for the water, you can prepare the mug, teabag and milk. In project management terminology, when you carry out tasks whilst another task is undergoing completion it is called parallel working.

In the field of project management and planning, the quickest way to get a complex group of tasks finished is to organize them so that they run in parallel. If you have five tasks to do and each task takes two weeks to complete, then if you carry them out in series, it takes ten weeks to finish the whole job. If you can do them all in parallel, then it only takes two weeks to complete the task. This is a highly effective planning method assuming that you have the manpower, equipment and other necessary resources available to allow this to happen. For most individuals working on a complex group of tasks this is generally not possible.

Attempting to carry out multiple of tasks simultaneously just doesn’t suit the way that our brains work. In fact, research shows that multitasking reduces your intelligence more than smoking pot (I could have given you the link here, but then you would have to multitask and lose attention, so I’ve put it at the end of the article for you =) ). This happens because the brain can only truly concentrate properly on thing at a time (And it terms of ADD, writing this post is taking longer than I expected. I put out some bird food on my balcony and I now have three sparrows and three greenfinches outside of my window and they are now fighting each other! That wasn’t what I planned on. Now then, where was I?). It takes a while for the brain to assess the task at hand and what has to be done to complete it. Certain tasks require a lot more concentration than other tasks because they require a creative response to the stimulus at hand.

For example, if you receive an e-mail, you have to work out who it is from, whether it is a new communication or whether it already refers to a previous history that you have to remember, you have to process the latest information or request and then formulate a response. Formulating the response could prove very time consuming and highly involved if it requires some deep problem solving. Even if it doesn’t, you have to translate your thoughts into written words and doing that spontaneously often requires reworking it several times. Spontaneous responses are often cluttered and don’t get to the point. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Sorry that I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have the time to write you a short one.”

Multitasking has a very severe and detrimental effect upon productivity. We carry out complex tasks most effectively when we can think clearly about the problem at hand, take the time to think through possible solutions, decide upon a solution, prepare and organize the resources necessary to implement the solution and then get on with that implementation without interruption. Detailed preparation carried out before setting to work on a task is one of the most effective ways to boost productivity. A start/stop approach is one of the most effective ways to reduce productivity. It’s bad enough when those stops occur due to genuine problems that prevent progress. It’s even worse when we allow the additional factor of distractions to enter into the equation.

Distractions such as e-mails, answering the phone and people turning up at your desk unexpectedly will grab our attention, because they seem urgent. Very often though, they are relatively unimportant. If you truly want to boost your productivity, then turn off your e-mail, put the phone on mute and if you really want to get things done, then put a sign on your desk saying “Do not disturb. Available at 3pm.” I know that in the office environment that it can be very difficult to make yourself unavailable, but do what you can to introduce a trend of having concentrated, uninterrupted blocks of time and guard those sessions well. Your productivity will soar and that will give you more time to give focused attention to those other issues that people want to involve you in.

Coming back to the issue of parallel working for people working alone, the way to organize yourself is to have two or three sessions of concentrated activity on separate tasks per day, or if it suits you, devote a whole day, or days, to doing a batch of work per week. I personally like to get my head down and blitz a task so that it is started and finished in one session. Sometimes I’ll do things in a batch and devote a whole day to that batch of work. Often though, it is important to keep up with progress and momentum on a number of diverse tasks, so I assign periods of time and do what I can in that time period and accept that I will not get it all finished that day and will continue with it very soon.

Finally, is effective multitasking possible? I would say “Yes” but only in a very limited way. For tasks that we are fully adept at, that don’t require any problem solving and that can be done on ‘automatic’ then multitasking is possible. For example, many people can drive a car and listen to the radio at the same time. A trained musician can play piano, or guitar, and sing at the same time. I, myself, can even walk and chew gum at the same time. If it’s easy, or if it’s trained through repetition, then it’s possible, but for new and unique tasks, then forget it.

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It is never enough to know what to do. You must also do what you know. The thinking and behaviors that you have today mostly developed as responses to solving problems that you encountered in your past. Most of that problem solving revolved around moving out of perceived pain as soon as possible into something more pleasurable, or at least not painful. Such behaviors have allowed you to survive and get along in the world, but very often, those behaviors don’t properly solve the underlying problem. Those behaviors are responses to symptoms of a problem. In order to move ahead in life and to overcome the root causes the create the symptoms and spark off our responses, we often have to think, behave and respond differently to how we now behave. We have to create new habits. Creating new habits is not so very hard, only it’s much easier not to create new habits, so we must prepare ourselves for this task, if we want to succeed more easily.

Your current thinking, interpretation of problems and your habitual responses have created your comfort zone. To get improved results in life, you have to transform yourself and that means going outside of your existing comfort zone. That has negative connotations, so instead, let’s think of it as expanding your comfort zone to encompass new levels of ability.

Very often, the new habit that we want to create does not require a huge step change in ability. The chances are that the behavior required is marginally possible but so far it has not been fully established within our overall sphere of competencies. The required habit has not been established because it still contains some problem solving that has not been properly resolved. Until we solve those problems, whether they be attitudinal or practical, then it will prove difficult to establish a habit.

Before we take a look at those problem solving aspects, let’s take a look a more detailed look at habits and why old ones seem difficult to overcome and replace with new ones. As mentioned above, your current responses sufficed as stop gap measures to deal with immediate difficulties, but if you keep coming up against the same problem time and time again, then your habitual response is ineffective, because it hasn’t solved the underlying root cause. However, unless we work on the root cause and develop habitual responses to deal with such a stimulus, then we will keep returning to our old habits, because they get us out of immediate difficulty. Our emotions drive us to seek relief from pain, because pain infers that some aspect of our survival might be at threat, and hence we seek instant gratification.

We can consider these ingrained responses as a kind of gravity. They keep pulling us back to old patterns of behavior. To establish a new habit, we have to achieve escape velocity to reach a new orbit. For a rocket, breaking through Earth’s gravitational pull requires huge amounts of energy in the initial few minutes. To overcome ingrained habits, we need to consider things in a similar fashion. Our willpower can be the spark that ignites the rocket, but it doesn’t have sufficient power to carry us into orbit. We need plenty of fuel in the form of dedicated action, and we can make the job easier by reducing the size of the payload. That payload is the problem-solving and preparation involved to make the change.

When considering adopting a new habit, it is first necessary to think about what has stopped you previously. Normally, there are points of resistance that thwart you.

1. Imagine the new habit that you want to adopt - how would you have to think and behave to make it a reality? What new knowledge, process or resources would you need to have to carry out this new resource consistently, over and over again?
2. List those items and then set about doing the necessary research, learning and preparation necessary to allow you to carry out the new habit.
3. Prepare your mind for carrying out the new habit. Set small desires for the new habit that are easy to fulfill. Write down the benefits that you will get from adopting the new habit. Think through the new process, especially where it will be difficult and what you have in place to make it easy.
4. Set your quitting parameters. This a tip from a marathon runner, who says that in the moment of some temporary frustration or annoyance you can easily feel mentally weak and want to quit. By identifying this likelihood, you can prepare your mind for it and set some standards and guidelines that will take you through the momentary resistance and that will keep you persisting. Of course, if it is really too difficult, then quitting is sometimes acceptable, just try to avoid make such decisions on a momentary whim.
5. Accept that difficulty and frustration will occur. In the beginning, it will prove slow and cumbersome to try out the new habit. You may have to do some further problem solving along the way as you experiment and make the habit smooth and easy to do.
6. Carry out new habits using a 30-day introduction program.

The 30-day program is recommended by many (including Steve Pavlina). This period of time allows you to go through three common phases that occur when adopting a new habit.

1. The first 10-days: This is where you have to overcome the most gravity. It’s where you need maximum willpower. You will encounter resistance and defiance as you seek to transform yourself. Through this process you end up adopting a new aspect to your identity and many people are resistant to this. Actually, you want the new behavior, but it’s different and it requires change. You need to keep up your desire to have the improved behavior and to go through this short-term, but high level of resistance. Since your willpower will not last for long, you need all of that prior preparation to reduce the load and make achieving escape velocity much easier.
2. The second10-days: Here there is less defiance but there is still active resistance, as you still need to condition the new way of responding. The old way of responding was easier and it probably delivered more instant gratification than the new way. However, if you want the long-term benefits that come from adopting the new behavior, then keep reminding yourself of this. Keep returning to the points 1 to 5 above to keep yourself on track.
3. The final 10-days: This is the period during which you become acclimatized to the new habit. The defiance and resistance has mostly faded away and is replaced by acceptance of the new habit. The habit becomes increasingly integrated and conditioned into your thinking, so that you miss it if you don’t do it.

You can make the adoption of new habits much more successful, if you build in flexibility into the process. Allow yourself some margin for slipping up. Set yourself an 80% rate of fulfillment, e.g. 5 or 6 days out of 7, rather than every day without fail. There’s no sense in beating yourself up for not following through like a robot each and every time. Perfection with implementing habits is not important. What we want to do is to create a trend of behavior that over time, and with continuous incremental advances, has a major and positive impact on the results that you create in your life.

If you fall off the wagon, then just accept that and quickly forgive yourself. Review your preparation of mind, method and resources and get back on track as soon as possible. If it’s still difficult to keep up a habit, then reduce your expectations and complexity, or else put more thought into the problem solving necessary to support the new habit and to make it easy to carry out.

Developing new habits is one of most important action skills that you need to develop. Without it, you are likely to just keep on reading about solutions and answers, but never implementing them. That will keep you where you are and you will find it difficult to get the improved results that you want in life. Creating new habits has become a major focus for me, so that I can regularly and properly implement all of the good things that I discover and can use to improve my life. How about you? What new habits do you want to adopt that maybe you are struggling with? What tips do you have to share on your own habit forming techniques?

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Normally we hate to close the door on potential options. We are creatures descended from a long line of predecessors who survived by living in the lowest risk fashion possible. We gather as many resources as we can to make survival more likely and we hate to cut off any potential option that might one day prove to be our salvation.

Having lots of options, or potential resources, available instinctively pleases us. A lack of options can lead to desperate circumstances and that truly puts all of us on edge. Sometimes though, deliberately cutting off options can lead to a grimly focused and determined state of mind. There is a story of Hernan Cortes, the conqueror of the Aztecs, which says that after his men and supplies had landed he burned his ships so that they had no option of retreat. They would either succeed or perish. To cut off all other options is brave, if you win, and foolhardy, if you perish. It’s not something to engage in, unless to hesitate and flounder ends up guaranteeing your defeat anyway.

By taking up many options and by preserving the option to take unused opportunities, we can end up doing ourselves a disservice. By running around from one activity to the next, we easily end up distracted, divided, unable to concentrate and rarely able to finish anything. This is a particular problem in today’s modern age, as the options available to us have become never ending. In the fear of missing out on good things we miss out on doing things well.

When it proves difficult to make a choice and to give something up then applying the principle of non-linearity (80/20 principle) can have a big impact on assessing the true and relative merits of one option against another. The principle of non-linearity tells us that a large proportion of what we spend our time upon and what we devote our efforts to actually has a very minimal payoff in terms of results and satisfaction. We can look at all of our activities and decide which ones give too little reward for the effort needed. By gaining an accurate perspective of how these things prevent us from achieving more and having greater satisfaction elsewhere, we can cut these out fairly easily.

I use the 80/20 rule when making difficult purchasing decisions, especially for gadgets and services with lots of complicated option permutations. It is easy to get distracted by all of the bells and whistles and coming up with the perfect combination can take hours, if such a perfect combination even exists. At this point I get back to basics and focus on the functionality that I want. With most gadgets and services, you end up using 20% of the functions, 80% of the time. For me, in the case of a mobile phone, that’s phoning, texting, storing numbers and using the alarm clock. Any phone that does that will satisfy me.

As another example, I recently bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner. I got hold of a brochure and price list and I went through all of the options attempting to get the perfect combination. I couldn’t find such a combination, or else I had to spend a lot more money to get most of the functions that appealed to me, plus extra ones of no appeal. I ground to a halt with my decision making process, so I got back to basics. I realized that 80% or more of the functionality and value of the Dyson cleaner lies in the basic design principles and in the quality of the manufacture. Those features are present across the entire range of products, so I opted to buy the base model with no frills. It was about 25% cheaper and yet contained all of the principle benefits. I’m still delighted with it.

For the bigger impact choices, we again need to assess the relative effects of effort versus reward. It is likely though, that we will have some options that we find hard to cut off, either because we have emotional attachment to them or because we are uncertain which choice will finally yield the best result. At this point it is important to accept that we cannot know the future and that a potential loss might occur. By weighing up the pros and cons it is sometimes possible to find a clearly better option, but not always. Our desires, and the respondent emotions that they create, can sway our rational assessment of issues. We can factor this in and accept that it is better to commit to something that has a greater desire value (and hence emotional and finally satisfactory value), than the logically better but less desirable option.

Finally, an option must be chosen and the other one discarded, even if it is promising, because to divide yourself between both of them actually jeopardizes both of them.

In the past, I used to dally over such decisions and would end up committing to nothing, which just resulted in time passing by (with inherent frustration and a sense of loss). The answer for me was to care less about results and to care more and more about the process of what it takes to set a desire and to do all of the things necessary to deliver that desire. The whole process of problem solving, in its entirety, from starting to fulfill a desire through to final fulfillment, is the ultimate capability to have. Once you’ve mastered that, then almost all other options that you want to take can become possible for you (assuming that they are not age or physiologically dependent). Once you have that capability, then you can pick up new activities with great speed, precision and excellent results. It is so much better to commit to one thing now, so that you can do and have much more later, than it is to attempt many things now and end up with poor quality results across the board.

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[Photo Top by Wazari. Photo Bottom by Enimal]

The brief history of the 80/20 rule is that in the 19th century and Italian economist, named Vilfredo Pareto, discovered that the distribution of wealth over the population was not linearly proportional, in fact it was distinctly non-linear. He discovered that approximately 80% of the wealth in Italy was held by just 20% of the population. He then did studies of other nations, for different periods of history and found the same conclusion. No matter what the epoch, or the economic conditions; the same non-linear result was found in roughly the same proportion. Later studies discovered non-linearity in many other groupings.

Now then, there are some things to be aware of here. This relationship occurs between two different items, e.g. input and output. It does not hold for just one set of items. Some people get confused with this, probably because the two figures add up to 100%, which many people wrongly assume is valid for just one item. Both items are 100% complete, but the effect of one item upon the other is disproportionate.

20% of the input from the left hand category creates 80% of the output in the left hand category.

I was amazed when I discovered this principle, but when I explained it other people and I got blank stares. So let’s take a look at some examples and interpret them for some useful conclusions:

• 80% of all crimes are committed by just 20% of all criminals. This means that if you want to drastically reduce crime, then you should focus more resources upon controlling or incarcerating the small group that creates the most problems.
• 80% of all divorces are carried out by just 20% of the population. This means that when you read divorce statistics saying that almost 50% of all marriages end in divorce that it doesn’t give you the whole picture. Some people get married and divorced many times over and so they shift the statistics overall. Actually, the majority of marriages succeed, however the statistics paint a bleak picture that can make people think twice about getting married and that will make taking the step of getting divorced seem a lot easier and almost normal.
• 80% of all traffic accidents are caused by 20% of motorists. This means that premiums should be raised for the few who do the most damage and lowered for the rest.

In a sense, it is a shame that the term 80/20 has stuck because not all non-linear relationships have those proportions. Sometimes it can be 90/20 or 70/10 or some other variation, but the principle exists all around us and you can measure it for yourself. After I read “The 80/20 Principle” by Richard Koch (a must have book for anyone truly interested and dedicated to improving personal productivity), I felt that my perception of the world had changed permanently for the better, but rather than take it on face value, I decided to test it.

At the time of reading it, I worked in a research laboratory in Switzerland and was responsible for running and maintaining laboratory facilities as well for experiments. When I started work at the facility, things were in a mess. We had a massive program of work to do and yet we were doing things very inefficiently. In order to make some radical time saving, I decided to do some time and motion studies and apply some non-linear analysis.

The results were a near perfect example of non-linear effects to 80/20 proportions. There were 20 start-up operations that had to be performed in order to commence a test. Some of these had a very short duration and some were very long. Just 4 of these operations (20%) took up 80% of the cumulative time taken to prepare for a test.

Prior to this kind of analysis, I might well have spent a lot of effort trying to shorten the duration of each of the 20 operations, but armed with non-linear analysis, it was clear that for the 16 items that took only 20% of the overall duration were not really worth bothering with. Even if I halved each of them (which was unlikely, time-consuming and expensive to do), I would have only cut the duration by 10%.

Armed with the analysis, I chose to focus on the 4 things that made the most difference. One of them was the result of a technical installation that was not properly finished and which consequently required considerable man-handling each time we did an experiment. By focusing on this one item and completing the installation properly, I eliminated 1 of the 4 major time consumers and, in this particular case, reduced the overall start-up duration by 25%. That was a result to be proud of and it didn’t stop there. I applied 80/20 analysis to as many measurable aspects as possible and made further massive savings. In the end, I doubled the productivity of the lab (admittedly, there were a lot of low hanging apples, but at least I had the good sense to identify them and pick them!).

I can’t emphasize enough the incredible effect that knowledge of non-linear relationships can have upon your ability to get things done. So much of what we do has a trivial effect upon our overall output and achievement. Once you know this, understand it and look out for it, you can create massive leverage in your ability to get things done. It’s the best tool out there to lift your efforts head and shoulders above the average effort.

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Money is a strange thing. It is entirely an invention of mankind and yet, in most societies, it massively dominates what we can do and cannot do, what we can have and cannot have. As with many problems in life, it is all too easy to get fixated upon the symptom of a problem (in this case and for most people, a lack of money), rather than upon the root cause of the problem (what it takes to live in such a way that money is easy to get). Key to analyzing any problem effectively is the need to understand the individual components involved on a fundamental level. By understanding the components, and the mechanisms that we create with them, we can change the mechanism, or the inputs to the mechanism, to get a different output (preferably to a result that we want).

Some years ago, I read a book called ‘The Tao of Money’ by Walter Lubeck. As with many Taoist books, it quickly became very esoteric, but it did present me with one idea that has stuck with me, which is that money represents stored energy. If take a look at the prehistory of mankind, people lived in societies where no money existed. In fact, for the greater part of human history our ancestors survived with no money. People used personal energy and ability to hunt for or to gather food. In exchange for energy and ability expended, calorific and nutritional rewards were gained. During that very long period, people lived off of the land and were self-sufficient.

With the discovery of agriculture and animal husbandry, the nomadic way of life increasingly gave way to settled farming. The concept of agriculture was something that could give an advantage to anyone who applied it. Energy was now invested into organized food production that gave better returns, at a lower overall risk. It was a massive productivity improvement. People settled into communities and the effectiveness of farming for producing food meant that energy could be put into developing other skills for producing useful goods and services. These would initially have been traded in exchange for other goods and services.

In each of these transactions, a person’s energy was invested into transforming raw materials into a useful product. The products had worth and value but were cumbersome to collect and store, and, in the case of degradable products, such as food, often had a time limited value. At some point, precious metals become a useful currency of exchange, because they save space, they are easily portable, and they don’t degrade easily. These precious metals were turned into a more standardized method of exchange and money was created. The crucial thing to remember, though, is that the purpose of money is to store and exchange energy. That’s a little abstract and we tend to forget this fundamental fact about money, but there it is and it’s important to be aware of this.

If we see money as energy, then it can become a measure of our ‘life force.’ By that, I mean that we only have a limited time and energy that is available to us on this spinning planet. The vast majority of us end up exchanging part of our life force (time and energy) to create value for other people and for which we receive a return of stored energy, which we use to provide for our survival needs and, beyond that, our aspirational desires.

Many people end up spending vast amounts of their life force in this arrangement of exchanging time and energy for money and I speculate that it is for this reason that money is such an emotionally charged subject. It is not just that money can demonstrate some aspects of achievement, it is also because money can become a measure of how much value their is in your life force. We can end up feeling pretty miserable about how limited our opportunities are when we exchange time for money. I think this is why people fight so hard to get money, to keep money, to get wage increases and to avoid taxation. Every little bit of money taken away from us represents some of our incredibly precious and limited life force. It’s not just money gone, it’s time gone and opportunity gone.

There are a fixed number of hours per day so payment based upon hours spent puts a cap upon what we can do and what we can expect. Very few people have ever gotten wealthy based upon an hourly rate alone. The way out of this limitation is to break the link between exchanging time for money. Wealth and abundance is created by leveraging the energy that you have and one of the best ways to do that is to create something and replicate it, so that it can be exchanged for energy many times over.

That’s why we live in such exciting times. Digital technology allows ideas, knowledge, information and entertainment to be created at lower costs than ever before and to be replicated at near zero cost. Add that to the internet, which allows communication and distribution at near zero costs, and the opportunities to break the link between time and money and to invest energy into producing useful goods and services that can be reproduced many times over becomes huge.

If you find yourself frustrated at the lack of money in your life, then realize that the money that you receive in your life is dependent upon how you transform the available energy in your life into useful products or services. You can increase your hourly rate by improving your productive value per hour. It’s up to you to implement the ways by which you can offer more value per hour (if you don’t know how then write a comment and I’ll create a post on this). However, if you want to supercharge your earnings then look for the ways in which you can invest energy once and exchange the value created many times over.

If you would like to receive more fundamental insights into better living, then subscribe to the nickpagan.com newsletter and you will receive a free copy of the ebook ‘Understand How to Operate Your Brain Perfectly.’ Please use the form at the head of the page.

[Photo by Jaz1111]