Saving Time: Easy Ideas For Everyday Multi Tasking

Here are some ideas for everyday multi-tasking that are both more efficient and more productive uses for your time.

Everywhere you look, people are bustling about trying to get two things done at once. You will see people at the grocery store checkout line conducting a business call on their cell phone or a woman at the coffee shop with her palm pilot in one hand, her laptop in front of her and a cup of coffee in her other hand. The concept of multi-tasking was developed to make our lives less complicated and more efficient. However, this does not always happen quite the way we would like it to. Our minds are not exactly made to handle two completely different trains of thought, so some argue that multi-tasking actually decreases efficiency. Sure, if you are typing out notes for a meeting with one hand and talking to a client on the phone about their investments at the same time, something will give. You will either type something wrong or sound extremely distracted and uninterested to your client. Effective multi-tasking takes into consideration the quality of the tasks being accomplished and the time it will take to accomplish these tasks. You must know what exactly can and should be multi-tasked. Here are some ideas for some simple and effective multi-tasks.

* You are in bumper-to-bumper traffic on your daily commute home. You can't exactly whip out your latest NY Times bestseller and start reading it right there, nor can you stomach the thought of listening to the same top 20 songs on the radio. If you have a long or traffic-ridden daily commute that seems to be never-ending, instead of listening to the same drab music everyday, why not invest in some self-improvement. Maybe you've always wanted to learn French or maybe you are planning a trip to Italy soon. Why not buy some French or Italian language tapes and practice a new language? You can spread out the audio lessons week by week and, before you know it, you will be able to speak the language, or in the very least, understand it. Perhaps you want to increase your self-esteem? You can buy some self-improvement tapes and listen to those on the way to and from work. Or maybe you just want to get some bestseller reading in and find you have no time once you get home. Go to the library or your local bookstore and pick up an audio tape of the book and listen to it on your commute.

* Most people have these moments of realization during the day where they remember they need to get a certain thing done. For instance, today I realized that I had to call my mother with a recipe that she has been wanting for quite some time. I have yet to do it and always seem to forget about it, save these rare moments when the memory sparks in my brain. If you have a cell phone with your or are near a phone, call your work or home phone and leave a message to yourself reminding yourself to get this done. When the memory arrives, instantly capture it by sending yourself a voice mail.

* If you are one of the lucky people that gets driven to work either in a car or on a bus or subway, you are a key candidate for multi-tasking. For instance, if you have a daily commute of thirty minutes and you aren't the one driving, that is thirty minutes to get some important things done. You can write down your daily list of to-do items, make phone calls to business associates or to friends who you need to get in touch with, read books for school or pleasure or get paperwork or homework done.

* When in your car running errands, before you start randomly driving off to one of your many destinations, take a few minutes to map out the different places you need to go to and the different errands you need to run. Instead of spending gas and time going randomly from errand to errand, you can find a route that will take you to all of your destinations in the quickest and most efficient manner possible.

Trending Now

© Demand Media 2011