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Jim Grisanzio: Successful CEOs don't multi-task

Of course not - that's what they want their computer to do for them.

Case in point: I don't want to have to visit 500 web sites to get my news ; Newsgator - do it for me.

I don't want to worry about downloading this 100MB file; BitTorrent do it for me.

I read my weblogs in the morning and in the evening, when I'm not doing much else and want to catch up on things. During the day, I try to stay focused on one thing at a time (in fact, that's a pretty good new year resolution - and for those who know me , it'll be tough) - staying focused on one thing is hard when you've got IM, support calls, emails amid 10 other projects that need to be worked on.

A few years back, one piece of advice ( I think it was actually in Dynamics of Software Development by Jim McCarthy) was to only check email once every x hours. The big problem now is that there's so much more email than ever before (and that's not including spam)- that it's easy to miss something.

My solution (and it takes a lot of discipline ) is to ignore the emails that don't directly impact me. If it's that important, I'll read it on one of the feeds I get or someone will resend it directly to me. I'm trying to get to that level of "simplicity" where as Bill Jensen suggests, delete 75% of your email.

Thanks Jim, for pointing to that Fortune article and keeping it focused.

Jim Grisanzio: Successful CEOs don't multi-task

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