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How to Tap Your Untapped Potential: Limited Bandwidth Hacks
Here’s the deal. You have only so much bandwidth, and if you start to try to take on more than your bandwidth can handle, you’re going to be in trouble, deep trouble, and you’ve got to get around that. By bandwidth I mean how much information you can hold in your mind at one time.
Research has been very, very solid on this. There’s actually a finite number of things you can hold in your mind. It’s seven bits of information plus or minus two. If you don’t know what the technical jargon means, I’m not sure I do, it just means that there’s only so much you can do and pay attention to simultaneously.
Really the best thing is to presume that you can’t pay attention to more than one thing simultaneously because the whole business about multitasking is a myth. All we do is interrupt ourselves continuously, and people who attempt to multitask, who try to do more than one thing at the same time, what you really succeed in doing is reducing their capacity to focus.
Focus is your ally, but learn to focus on one thing, to eliminate distractions so anytime you really want to get work done, and you want to get around the issue that you can’t hold that much in your mind at one time, yield to that. Get rid of distractions. Turn off everything that could buzz you or interfere with your work, prompt you. Don’t be connected to electronic devices other than your laptop if that’s what you have to do, but get rid of the social media and all the distractions.
Those are things that actually pull you down. They interrupt you. Anytime you’re focusing, and you’re concentrating, and you’re deeply accomplishing something because your focus is sharp and you’re really on something, if you are interrupted, research shows that it takes from six to 20 minutes or more, maybe 30 minutes, for you to resume the same focus you had before you were interrupted. Don’t take on too many things at the same time.
The major bandwidth hack is to learn how to focus and be satisfied with that. Go with one thing. Do it well, and then segue to something else after taking a break. Do this and you will be amazed at how much more you can get done in a day if you set up one or even two focus periods where you take all that bandwidth, and you use it for one thing with no interruptions. It’s amazing what will happen.
