Don't Push, Pull Instead

When I was a post-doc, my advisor once told me, “You have to learn to do more than one thing at a time.” We were sitting in her office having one of our weekly conferences and, while I’d made progress on one important project, there were several others on my list, and she’d expected similar progress across the board.

I find myself reflecting on that moment recently, because even though it was over a decade ago, it stands out for two reasons.

One, I felt rather chastised and inadequate.

Two, after years since of trying to do more I’m realizing learning to do more than one thing at a time was actually bad advice.

Increasingly, researchers and business gurus are understanding that the human brain doesn’t actually multi-task. It just task switches quickly. But frequent task switching is inefficient and energy draining.

And that’s why chipping away at a dozen things at once is a recipe for overwhelm, spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast. Being busy but not necessarily productive.

Some advice encourages us to whittle our focus down to just a key priority or two to solve this problem. True, we can’t do everything all at once.

But for those of us with lots of big goals in life and work, we must find realistic ways to do more than the average.

And if you want to stick with building up better money skills while also parenting, working, remodeling, vacationing, volunteering, starting businesses, and all the other big things that you and I want to do in life… well, we need strategies to help.

The key is in a few words I mentioned above… “all at once.” You can do a lot in life, just not all at once.

While you might not be able to whittle your to-do list down to a tidy few, you can select a few at a time.

This is called a “pull” method, modeled after assembly line style operations that experience bottle necks in the workflow. With a “pull” working approach, certain work sits idle until the slate is cleared at the next step and then resumes forward motion again.

Perhaps you’ve been meaning to figure out your retirement plan, sit down with the financial advisor your friend recommended, buy life insurance, reshop your car insurance, set up a 529 plan, and move your savings to a high yield account.

But that list of tasks in combination with the routine ones of paying the bills and managing your spending each month just gets overwhelming sometimes - and nothing new ever gets accomplished. Instead, the list keeps growing, the important giving way to the urgent.

If you experience this, try a pull method. Deliberately put your important financial tasks and projects on a hold list where they wait patiently. Then pull just one at a time off that list to work on next. No “I should be… I need to be…” swirling in your head. You can focus on just one until it’s cleared.

This approach can help in your personal and professional life, but it can make those forever stuck financial projects start moving again as well.

And when you respect the reality that you can only handle one thing at a time by utilizing this method, you can ultimately accomplish quite a lot.