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the power of multitasking - ilie pandia

The power of multi-tasking (to distract you)

The best way to be productive is to multitask. Write your emails as you listen to a podcast. Talk on the phone as you are planning your day. Run two or more projects simultaneously, so none of them has “downtime” waiting for your attention. Create meetings with at least seven items on the agenda; this will force you to be on point and effective. And always stay on top of your phone notifications with near-instant response times. That is how productive people rule the world!

If the above sounds bonkers to you, you are correct. However, this is how I used to run my life, and I was a big believer in multitasking. As a software engineer, the way computers multitask is fascinating to me. And it was only “normal” to adopt the concept in my attempt to be more productive.

“There is no Spoon.”

Or better said, in this context, there is no multitasking. What happens inside a computer is that the CPU switches between programs so fast that for the human perception, it looks like it does a million things at once. In reality, the computer does one thing, then changes the context and does the next thing, and so on.

And our brain does the same. It can focus on only one thing at a time.

When you work and “at the same time” answer your Telegram, here is what happens:

  1. Your brain interrupts the work.
  2. Remembers what the Telegram conversation is about so it can understand the message.
  3. Then it creates a response.
  4. And then it goes back to work mode, trying to remember where you left off so you can continue.

Unlike a computer, changing the context of what to focus on is not as fast or easy for us humans. Context switching has a high cost! It may appear you are doing more, but the quality and depth of what you are doing drop dramatically.

I will not quote any studies around this. Instead, let’s look at some examples that are easy to understand:

If you work on a novel, or your next article, or your piece of art, and you get really focused on it, you can get into what is called “the zone.” You are inspired. The words flow, the vision is clear. Then the phone rings! How easy do you think it is to get back into that flow? Yes, you remember where you were, but the words are not flowing; the vision is now blurry. You are still spending time with your craft, but instead of bringing it forth, you stare at it uninspired.

A different example.

You are in a deep conversation with someone. You feel connected. Feelings and emotions are shared. The phone beeps again! It’s a fun emoji from your knitting group. You choose not to respond at this time and return to your conversation. What you will notice is that the quality of it has changed. There is no more depth. You need to connect again and dive deep again. Something was lost the instant your attention changed.

Multitasking gives us the illusion that we are connected with multiple things at the same time, but in reality, we just touch them briefly while we thirst for connection and meaning.

But let’s bring this back to business and being productive.

The two examples above illustrate an ability that we humans have, and computers don’t. And that is to go deeper into things and to access a place of intuition and inspired action.

That is the place where you have the insight that changes your life. That is the place where a product comes from that solves a problem in a unique way. That is the place where you can write something for your audience that shows a deep understanding and care for them.

You cannot get to that place if you are constantly switching between the things that you do.

And here is the crazy part.

Setting aside uninterrupted blocks of time for each project is better, but it is still context switching. Instead of doing it each 5 minutes, you do it each hour or two, depending on how long the block is.

Maybe this feels natural to us because of how school is set up. It fragments our attention, and you constantly need to change the context, so you begin to think this is “normal.”

But have you ever lost yourself in reading a book? Or in creating a painting? Or in dancing? When hours go by, and you don’t notice? Maybe that is the natural way and more effective way.

I notice in myself that when I focus on one thing, for days or weeks, my mind creates connections that do not happen otherwise. Because the context is always the same as the day unfolds, I experience and observe the same things from many different angles. Everything around me is suddenly connected and related to what my mind focuses on in a very real way.

If you’re focused on marketing and better communication, even when you drink your water, you find yourself thinking: why did I buy this cup? How was that choice informed? Was it the colors? The comfort of purchase? Why do I still use it? How can I communicate all this to my audience?

I am now in the process of decluttering my life. Even though I am curious and I love learning, I am choosing to say “NO” to most things so I can give myself the chance of going deep on the things that I say “YES” to.

There is no multitasking. Choose one thing, do it well, do it until you feel complete. Then choose the next one.

The people who use mentors and coaches advance 4x faster

As a lone wolf, I take great pride in doing things by myself. But since I became a father, the stupidity of that was obvious. While it can be fun and challenging, it is also very slow and inefficient. We don’t have unlimited time, so the choices we make on spending time matter!

Learning from other people’s mistakes and hiring coaches and mentors makes a lot of sense if you want to progress fasters.

But how do you choose a good coach or mentor?

I used to believe that you need to go for world-class coaching. Because you can advance the fastest if you learn from the best of the best:

  • They’ve tried it all.
  • They know what works and what doesn’t.
  • Since they are world-class, you won’t find this knowledge anywhere else.

But there is a serious flaw in my thinking! And that is: I am asking a word-class coach to teach me how to most effectively swim across the wide canal, without ever once entering a swimming pool. 

Simply put: there is absolutely no way for me to apply the advice they give me, and it is a high chance I may not even understand it.

I realized that you need to start at the beginning, not at the end. Meaning: if you want to beat the world record at swimming across the canal, you will need to start with learning how to swim in the first place!

So my revised definition of a good coach or mentor is someone who is way ahead of you so they can challenge you and point out your mistakes, but not someone who is so ahead of you that what they are saying makes no sense!

Think about this for a moment: even if you can afford a one-hour call with the best swimming coach on the planet, you don’t know what to ask. It is improbable that you will ask the questions that would get you the most value. 

It is the same when building your online presence. Trying to do it alone is slow. But trying to hire the best team to make you a mega-website as your first project is not the best idea either. 

Strategy is what helps you understand the difference between an opportunity and a distraction

What will you do today to grow your online presence? 

Every day you have thousands of ways to answer that question. You could follow this or that process. You could hire this or that coach. You can choose to do nothing. You can choose to focus on this aspect and ignore the rest. 

So how do you make the right choice? And how do you filter out the distractions that will take you nowhere?

And the answer is to have a clear vision and strategy to get there. 

The strategy to get to 10 subscribers this month is very different than the strategy to get 100k subscribers, and you will use very different tools and processes. 

When you have a clear vision and a defined strategy, you can very quickly narrow down the actions that you have to do by asking this simple question:

“Does this fit within my strategy as a step to get me closer to my goal?”

If the answer is YES, then go for it!

If the answer is NO, then you are just busy getting distracted. 

Building a vision and then a strategy is hard work. I am still working on mine. But I know for sure that if you do this hard work initially, you dramatically increase your chances of success. The alternative is to be busy for ten years launching efforts in all directions but not making any progress. 

Buying Time

There is always a chance for you to make back the money you lost, but lost time is lost forever.

I often talk about our time as a non-renewable resource, and while you cannot buy more time, you can always save time. 

You do this by buying the time that other people have spent learning to do what you want to do today. 

And it compounds: the sooner your start, the faster you will go. The later you start, the harder it is to catch up. 

There are two parts to our life: the part when you have more time than money and the part when you have more money than time. 

I am talking to those in part two because while you are in part one, you trick yourself into thinking there will always be more time.

Invest in Yourself

Use some of the money you have to buy the information that will put you in the fast lane. Hire a consultant, do a strategy call. 

Our egos will trick us into thinking that we know what we are doing and we don’t need someone else drafting a plan for us or reviewing the one we have created. So we end up making mistakes that we could have easily avoided. 

I believe in learning from mistakes, but it’s best to learn from new mistakes instead of rehashing the same territory. 

Ask yourself: has anyone else done this before? What can I learn from them? How can I take that and go farther? 

Use tools like Udemy or Skillshare. Get to know who is word-class in your field and follow their content. Hire them if you can afford it. 

Most people are willing to spend thousands of dollars building a website, but they would not spend $300 to hire a consultant first. What do you do if you realize it is the wrong audience, the wrong tech, or that you are too late at the end of building your website? At that point, you realize how cheap and effective it would have been to get on that strategy call.

What I do today I could have done ten years ago. Instead, I chose to poke around in the dark instead of asking for directions. Yes, I learned what I learned deeply and profoundly, but is it worth ten years of my life? My older self says “no.” I can only imagine where I would be today if I had a ten-year headstart. 

And it is not only about you. The longer it takes you to get your act together, the longer we miss your contribution. 

Buy a map, get a compass, hire a guide, and then go where no one has gone before. 

Using WordPress the wrong way

I have been using WordPress the wrong way, and I have just realized it. 

I often wondered why anyone would want a website built with WebFlow or with SquareSpace when WordPress gives you the power to customize everything you want.

The answer is so simple and evident that it is a little embarrassing that I have not seen it before.

Most people don’t want that power. 

Most people want a website that will help them get closer to their business or personal goals. And if you are not a web developer, those goals do not include customizing every aspect of your site. 

I have watched a video presentation with a project hand-over where the client could only add new items on their site: new beer flavors. I am looking at this, and I am thinking: “wow, that customer is powerless. He is so limited in what he can do with the site. For every little change, he will need to hire the developer again.” 

But I was wrong. The client was not into doing minor changes on the site. He wanted a professional website that he could be proud of, and he only wanted to add more beer flavors. Being so limited in what he could do also meant there was no way he could make a mistake or break the site. He could relax into doing what was important to him. 

When delivering a website built in WordPress, it may not be a good idea to hand over the admin account. The administrator account can feel overwhelming with all the buttons available, and it is also very easy to break the site. 

What you should do instead is to create custom post types, custom fields, and custom capabilities and then set up an account that can only work with those and hand over only that account. This way, the client cannot break the site, and they can only customize and update the items they need to. 

Of course, you have to discuss a maintenance plan for the cases where admin access is needed, but that is a different discussion.

Would you be offended not to have administrative access to your site? Or would you be relieved? 

Lack of Clarity leads to poor results

While it is common sense, it is not common practice to ask “WHY” when doing something. 

Building your new website, or revamping the old one, needs to have a strong “why” behind it. 

If you are doing it because everybody else is doing it, or because your competition is doing it, that is not good enough. 

Drilling deep with the “why-questions” can help you uncover clear, measurable goals. When you have clear, measurable goals, not only do you know what to ask from your vendors, but it is effortless to see where you are headed and when you have reached your destination. 

Clear, measurable goals also cut to the clutter of questions like: “what colors should I use?” “what size should the logo be?”, “what layout should my home page have?” The answer is very straightforward: choose the option that gets you closer to your goals. 

If you don’t know which one gets you closer, you can either default to what works in your space or A/B test it if you have a large enough audience. 

Getting clarity is hard but is the step that has the most impact on the project’s success. I’d rather delay something until I get crystal clear than building a solution that brings me to the wrong place. 

The power of Everyday

The power of “Every Day.”

What if I told you that if you want to get rich, all you have to do is to put a pebble in a jar every day for 100 days? The rules are:

  • You cannot skip a day.
  • If you do, you need to start over.
  • You also cannot put pebbles in that jar ahead of time.

Do you think this is stupid? Do you think this will work? Are you willing to put it to the test? 

I hope you do, as you will learn a crucial lesson. 

It is effortless to do something once or twice: get on a healthy diet, exercise, develop that marketing skill that you need. But as soon as you commit to doing it every day for 100 days, all sorts of problems come up. 

“What if I forget? What if I have to fly? What if I am too tired? Too sick? In a hospital? What if I change my mind and this is no longer important?”

All of a sudden, “every day for 100 days” seems nearly impossible. 

And yet, some people have done it. And not only for 100 days but for years in a row. 

There is a considerable power inconsistency. In always showing up, even when you don’t feel like it, especially if you don’t feel like it! 

What you may also discover is that you will not have a lot of competition, as most will give up after ten days or so, and you will have many people looking up to you because, at some level, they understand that showing up 100 days in a row is very difficult. So there is a certain kind of power around the people who do it. 

I challenge you to give this a try and report back with the results. Personally, I am yet to have a 100 days streak of doing anything consistently. But don’t make this your excuse.

Send email reliably from WordPress

I am getting close to 20 years of putting together websites for myself and other people, and I have seen a shift happen with email, both in what is possible and what the expectations are. 

In the “old days,” you would get a hosting account for your site, and the email would magically work every time you would need to send one. 

This setup worked because the email protocol itself is very open and interoperable, so it is straightforward to send an email to someone, as long as you have their address.

This openness also invited spammers, who abused the system, making it harder for everyone to send and receive genuine and relevant communication. 

Today, most people expect that email will work “like it used to,” but what is more likely to happen is that all the emails you send out of our WordPress site will not reach their destination. You will not notice this problem unless you specifically test for it. Instead, you will see a lack of engagement or customers complaining they did not get their download links. 

There are a couple of solutions to this problem that are free, but I will present the most effective one: buy a paid email delivery service. 

When you pay for your email delivery service, there are some significant advantages over a free solution:

  • you immediately set yourself apart from the spamming crowd that is using the free solution
  • you have dedicated tools and reports to monitor that your email is delivered and reaches its destination
  • you get support with configuring the email sending process correctly, which is not trivial
  • you get analytics – which is essential for a business owner
  • someone (the service provider) is directly responsible for delivering your email and making sure the process works as expected

Unfortunately, I have seen a lot of people shy away from paying for email. Put your business hat on and think of it this way: how much money and (more importantly) how much time are you wasting with lost emails, with dealing with un-happy customers, with the uncertainty that your outbound messages reach their targets? I bet that the numbers you come up with more than make up for the cost of a paid email service. 

What email service should you use? 

In the past, I have worked with SendInBlue, SendGrid, and Mandrill. Today, my favorite one is MailGun. I am not an affiliate; I recommend them because (as I write this) they offer the best value for money. 

To connect WordPress to Mailgun, the plugin to use is WPMailSMTP.

Shopify – The cost of free

I am a long time user of WordPress and WooCommerce as an eCommerce platform. 

The reasons I got into using those two are likely the same as for everyone: both WooComerce and WordPress are free, so this leaves me with more money for marketing. And a secondary reason: both WooCommerce and WordPress are open-source, which means you can customize them to do pretty much anything you want. 

So what is my conclusion after over five years of using this combo? 

It is not really “free!”

There is the obvious cost of having to pay for hosting. And if you want to do anything useful with WooCommerce, you need to add up extensions and plugins that are not free. The same goes for professional-grade plugins that you will install into the main WordPress site. The total costs with software add to about $50/mo, and to that, you need to add your hosting, which for serious stores it will not be a “starter plan.”

But there is a hidden cost that I don’t see many people talk about. And that is the time and focus you need to put into setting up WordPress and WooCommerce and then maintaining it to make sure it remains secure and up to date. And when (not if) something breaks down, it’s up to you to fix it. 

As a software developer, I am OK with fiddling with tech, fixing bugs, diving deep into the code. But as I transition into being and thinking like an entrepreneur, I notice that instead of working on my business, on my marketing, on coming up with new ways to find and support my target audience, I spend a lot of time tinkering with code. And while it is fun, it does not scale. 

The web is changing at an ever-increasing rate. Sometimes just trying to keep up eats a lot of my time. And the thing with “time” is that it is a non-renewable resource. You cannot ever get a refund on a time you’ve spent doing something. 

So what do you want to do? Spend time learning how to put together the free tools and fix them when they get broken? Or would you instead spend time creating content, products or doing marketing, or simply taking some time off to spend with the family? 

For all these reasons, I am now looking into and recommending the Shopify solution. 

Shopify is right for you if:

  • you are serious about your store, so you will generate sales
  • you don’t have any tech skills, and you don’t want to spend time learning tech
  • you don’t want to worry about security, backups, performance, or maintenance 
  • you value time more than money

If you know of another eStore platform that saves you time, let me know in the comments below. I’d also like to know your experience with WooCommerce as it relates to this article.

Is this the best way to accomplish our goals?

Have you ever tried to coach a team towards an end goal but failed? Either because you can’t get your point of view across or because the discussion gets sidetracked continuously into things that are not that important? 

I have tried to send documentation to be studied that points at the right solution. That did not work. 

I have tried to use my experience and authority to give them the best solution and move on to the implementation phase. That did not work either. 

I have tried allowing them to learn on their own and to figure it out eventually. That also did not work because of time constraints. 

And guess what the common denominator is to all the failed attempts? Me! 🙂

My thinking says: if they only had the right information, they would see things like I do. Unfortunately, that is not true. As I am discovering, each one of us sees the world through a different lens. Our views may be similar, but they will never be the same. 

Today I was studying Seth’s book “Stop Stealing Dreams.” And I was fascinated with how many ideas he can share, without giving any advice on what to do! And not only that, but almost every paragraph had me stop and ponder what was said. I could feel the cogs in my brain getting a good workout!

I had to digest the entire book to figure it out finally. And the answer is now simple and obvious. Seth asks a lot of questions, inviting the reader to think for herself!

And the most potent question was:

“Is this the best way to accomplish (…insert goal here…)?“

This question serves double duty:

1. It makes sure that we know and agree on what the goal is. If we don’t, we need to go way back in our discussion and check and decide on our goals again. 

2. Once we agree on the goal, asking “is this the best way” opens everybody’s mind to contribute in a focused way towards the goal. 

The key difference for me is that I no longer dish out my solutions but instead invite everyone to contribute. The best way that the group finds may be way better than what I had initially thought the correct answer was. We all learn, and we move forward together.

I will definitely give implement this one in my communication.