1. Your time feels fragmented and ‘bitty’

Brigid Schulte, harassed mother of two and reporter for the Washington Post, remembers very clearly the point at which she decided she had to write her book Overwhelmed: How To Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time. She was clearing up after her son’s birthday party and her husband was outside on the patio smoking a cigar. She’d cleared the food and plates away and all that was left to do now was to sweep the ‘Happy Birthday’ confetti off the table and floor. As an exhausted Schulte surveyed the small bits and pieces all over the place, it occurred to her that her life felt exactly like the confetti: scattered, fragmented and exhausting.

Sound familiar? When we’re trying to stretch ourselves too far, we lose sight of our goals and feel overwhelmed. This is how our time feels: like hundreds of little pieces of confetti – that when you put them back together don’t seem to amount to much. You feel like you’ve been on your feet all day, completing endless tasks: sending emails, running errands, and working your way through an ever-expanding to-do list – but do you feel like you’ve actually achieved anything?

Of course, you’re not alone in feeling like this. Our harried lives and constant busyness seem to have overtaken the weather as the UK’s number one topic of conversation. We have more choice than ever in terms of what we do with our time, but this is stressing us out even more because we don’t know what to focus on. As a result, we fall into the trap of trying to focus on everything, splintering ourselves and our time into a million pieces of ‘time confetti’.

This goes not just for work but for family and leisure time too. It’s probable that you feel like you don’t have enough down time and that it’s difficult to get any unbroken periods of relaxation when your day is so fragmented. But the thing is, this down time is actually always in reach – you just need to learn how to find it.

This book will not change ‘time’. There will always be 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. What it will help you with, however, is how you manage and therefore experience time, so that things feel more focused and you feel calmer and, ultimately, happier. Schulte calls it moving from ‘time confetti’ to ‘time serenity’. Imagine …

2. You feel like you’re constantly trying to do several things at once

Multi-tasking. It used to be seen as a virtue, didn’t it? Something to be proud of. Taking a call whilst jotting down a to-do list? Well done you. Firing off quick emails during a meeting? Practising your presentation whilst driving into town? Two birds with one stone! Maybe you still look at multi-taskers in awe. If you ask most people, however, (including yourself) we bet they’d say in practise that multi-tasking is something they feel they have to do rather than choose to do, and that it only adds to their feelings of being overwhelmed.

“ Do the right thing at the right time, rather than trying to do everything all of the time. ”

Sháá Wasmund, MBE, speaker, entrepreneur and author

If you look up the term ‘multi-tasking’ on Wikipedia, it tells you that the term itself derives from ‘computer multi-tasking’ (where the computer performs multiple tasks concurrently). It entered our vocabularies in the late nineties, early noughties. It was a time when the Information Age was just beginning, and there was a definite feeling of ‘more is more’ and ‘faster is better’. This could explain why ‘multi-tasking’ had much more positive connotations back then.

But now, 15 or more years later, could we be finally waking up to the multi-tasking myth? Could it be that doing several things at once doesn’t actually make us more focused and productive and that, in fact, the opposite is true? Scientists and academics certainly seem to think so.

Researchers at Stanford University¹ compared groups of people based on their tendency to multi-task and their belief that it helps their performance. They found that heavy multi-taskers – those who multi-task a lot and feel that it boosts their performance – were actually worse at multi-tasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time. The frequent multi-taskers performed worse because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another.

In short, multi-tasking reduces your efficiency and performance, because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time.

Something to tell the kids when they’re trying to do their homework in front of the TV at least?

“ No two tasks done simultaneously can be done with a 100 per cent of one’s attention. ”

Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed

We know it sometimes feels irresistible, not to mention unavoidable, to do several things at once. We also know that multi-tasking doesn’t have to mean doing several tasks at once; it can also mean being several things at once. Role-switching is something we’re going to look at in more detail later on, but now we’ll just say this: this book is about finding Real Focus. We hope you’re convinced that in order to do that, it’s better to do one thing at a time. There, you see? Easy. You’ve probably improved your focus no end already just with that one small promise to yourself.

3. You feel like life is a series of interruptions and distractions

That’s possibly because it is. From the constant ping of messages and Facebook updates, to the seemingly unavoidable distractions like phone-calls and meetings, there are constant demands on our attention. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but with 24/7 access to it, news channels and addiction to social media, we are constantly bombarded with information in a way we weren’t even 20 years ago. It’s got to the point now where sociologists are calling it an official ‘Crisis of Attention’, because there are so many things we could focus on, we don’t know which are important anymore. We’ve lost the art of concentration.

“ Every time you are distracted from one task by something or someone else it takes an average of eleven minutes to get your focus back. ”

Sháá Wasmund, MBE, speaker, entrepreneur and author

This book can’t rewind the technological age and eradicate Facebook and Twitter (although you probably sometimes wish it could). What this book hopes to do, however, is suggest ways you might manage these constant distractions – even eradicate some. We hope to empower you with the ability to switch off from what isn’t important so that you can focus on what is.

4. You feel like you’re constantly busy but achieving nothing

We suspect that if we asked you how busy you were, your response would be *face-aghast* ‘Are you kidding? You’ve NO IDEA!’ It’s become our standard response, almost as though if you’re not seen to be permanently frantic, there must be something wrong.

Of course, we’re all gripped by a busyness epidemic. You only need to try and organize a social with your friends and be told ‘Love to! But my next free weekend isn’t until four months’ time’ to know that. You’re so busy, but have you ever stopped to ask yourself what you’re busy doing exactly? What ‘busy’ means, in reality, for you? And above all, what is all the busyness achieving?

The key to looking at this might be first to come to a better understanding of what ‘busy’ actually means. The dictionary definition says ‘engaged in activity’. But is this the same thing as productive? Focused?

In short, the thing to remember is that with action you have something to show for it – for example, booking a holiday; whereas with an activity you don’t – spending hours browsing on the Internet for one, for example. We hope this book will help you to have something to show for your efforts more often than not. And we don’t just mean work projects or meeting deadlines, we mean achieving your dreams, nurturing your relationships and generally leading a more full and balanced life.

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