Page 117 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

STEP 4: IDENTIFY YOUR NATURAL TALENTS AND ABILITIES 105

taskers and do our best work and are most productive when we
allow ourselves to focus on one thing at a time. The single-taskers
also tend to do their best work in a slower-paced environment. If
too much is going on at once, they are overwhelmed and become
inefficient. The fast-paced work environment typically appeals to
the multitaskers, who thrive on a bit of chaos and commotion.
Try this experiment and see whether you are a natural single-
tasker: Clean off everything from your desk, divert the phones,
and turn off the e-mail message reminder. Tell associates that you
can’t be disturbed for the next hour or two. Now work on just one
thing, and give yourself permission to do that and only that. . . .
How did it go? Did you get an impressive amount accomplished
in a relatively short period? Did you feel thoroughly satisfied with
your achievement? If you sometimes feel you’d like the world to
stop, you are in all probability a single-tasker. If, on the other hand,
you struggled to focus and wanted to break up this task with other
tasks, then you are a multitasker by nature and would perform
better by having two or three projects going simultaneously.
Some of my clients have two or three desks or workstations in
their offices and have a different project in process on each sur-
face. To stay motivated, they move from station to station to work
on these various projects whenever they feel their enthusiasm or
energy waning. This setup keeps them happy, and they get more
accomplished than they would if they had to do one project at a
time, which they find too boring. Experiment and you’ll soon dis-
cover your natural style.
For single-taskers, heaven is being given just one thing to do
and the uninterrupted time in which to complete it. When some-
one suggested that I pack up my bags and go on an authors’ retreat
at a B and B to work on this book, I nearly salivated. Nothing to
do but write? No business matters to attend to, e-mails to answer,
or kids to look after? That would be wonderful—for a week. It
also feeds the extrovert in me, as I could hang out with the other
writers after putting in a good day at the keyboard or sneak out
for lunch or for a break. Pure heaven! Most people don’t have the
luxury of working on one thing at a time, especially if their bosses