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Personal development: Does multi-tasking have a downside? March 17, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Goal Setting and Realization.
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By Dennis Mellersh

In seeking to accelerate our progress towards reaching our potential through personal growth programs and their associated practices, we may be tempted to turn to multi-tasking as a solution.

But when the concept of multi-tasking is applied incorrectly then it is not necessarily an effective choice.

Multi-tasking will generally be counter-productive if it is viewed, for example,  as having a big to-do list for the day and constantly jumping from one task to another, thus giving us the feeling that we are accomplishing a lot.

Unfortunately we are more likely to be doing our tasks less efficiently than if we tackled them one by one and focused on each of them separately until they are completed.

It’s hard to focus on two things at once and expect fully productive results.

It’s like the habit many of us have of reading a book, the newspaper, or a magazine, for instance, while we are eating.

We don’t get the same reward from either enjoying our food, or appreciating what we are reading, than if we did both tasks separately.

Personal growth: Many small actions result in big success March 16, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development Potential.
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By Dennis Mellersh

Achieving success with personal improvement and development programs is like completing any worthwhile, complex, long-term, large-scale project.

The best results are usually achieved incrementally by working on bite-size portions as often as possible.

Instead we often dismiss that approach and instead opt for doing something more substantial and significant when we “have more time.”

And predictably, “having more time,” happens infrequently, sometimes not at all.

If we wait for great swathes of free time, our book will never get written.

But if we write a hundred words a day, it will materialize reasonably quickly.

If we wait until we develop a grand plan for helping others it may never happen.

But if we put some clothing in a collection box today, we have already started on an outward- looking path of service to others.

And we have all learned from experience that if we want to learn something like a new language, “cramming` is the least effective way to do it.

Our goals of achieving our full potential in personal development will respond best to frequent, and ideally daily, action-oriented reinforcement.