Do you suffer from computer-screen attention deficit disorder? Below are a few symptoms: You have five Internet Explorer tabs open at once. You’re working away at three Word documents at the same time, and you’re messing with two open spreadsheets, too. In other words, you are balancing so many on-screen tasks all at once, you’re struggling to complete any one of them.
With tabbed browsing, it’s not hard to open dozens of browser pages, Word documents, and apps at the same time. Problem is, this is also a terrific way to distract yourself from the most important jobs on your “to do” list.
Focusing on several things at once can hurt your productivity. But there are a couple steps you can take help break these habits.
Resist the minimization urge
When we focus on many tasks at once, big and small, we can get in the habit of minimizing windows. We do this to set a task aside, but by doing this we are putting it off. By breaking this habit we force ourselves to focus on a task at hand until it is finished rather than putting it off.
Email filters
Create filters for your email messages. This is pretty simple but powerful, too: You might set your filters so that only email messages from a certain number of important contacts are delivered to your inbox. Email messages from all other senders are sent instead to secondary folders to be addressed later. But those messages that make it to your inbox? Those are the important ones, those that you need to deal with now. Again, this practice may seem odd at first. You might worry that you’ll miss important email messages. Nevertheless, you might be amazed at how few of your email contacts frequently send you messages that you must deal with immediately.