 Welcome everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join my session. Mindless multi-tasking a dummy's guide to productivity. I'm going to start with introductions. I'm curious how many programmers we have in the room. Wonderful. What about agency owners or managers? Few marketers? Any other job titles I missed? Okay, so we've got a pretty diverse group of people. I imagine you're all from different countries as well. Myself, I'm from Vancouver Canada and I'm a digital PM. I'm also director of business analysis in a group of quality assurance analysts. It's a bit of a mouth full of title. I'm also a yoga teacher as well. And I've been practicing for about 20 years and teaching for 10. And my yoga has always helped me balanced in the workplace. I've been working in tech for about 20 years as well. I want to ask also how many of you experience stress in the workplace? If you haven't, I want to talk to you after to really find out what your secrets are. So in this next 15-20 minutes together we're going to talk about what the effects of multi-tasking are on your productivity. Understanding the signs of stress in your body. Now this could be different for everybody. I'm going to share more of my personal story. We're going to learn how to jumpstart your productivity. Also I want you to hopefully leave us some ideas on improving your well-being. So what is multi-tasking? I can see some people on their phones right now. That's okay. I'm assuming you must be taking notes. Maybe you have a computer open. Maybe you're taking notes, handwriting. But in this busy 24-hour day connected world we have our devices with us. We feel like we always have to be switched on. At least I do many times. Some things are types of multi-tasking that are easy enough to do together. For example I can make dinner and talk to my sister on the phone. It's usually I don't burn anything. However I'm not really fully present with the conversation at all times and I may not be fully paying attention to what I'm doing when cooking dinner. There are other types of multi-tasking where it could be a little more dangerous. For example if you're texting and driving or putting makeup on and driving. Or reading a book and driving. I'm a cyclist. I ride my bike to work most days. We don't have quite the setup as we do here in Amsterdam with cycle lanes. I think this is fabulous here. So sometimes we have to share the road with drivers. And the one time I was clipped, it was a minor accident by a car, the person was on their phone. So texting and driving do not mix. Please don't do it. We're coming into the workplace. So how many of you can relate to this? You arrive, you've got your morning coffee in hand. You take a couple of morning calls. You might even check your email on that call. Check your Slack messages. I see some of you nodding, yes. You finish. You maybe take another call. You talk to some of your colleagues. Go get another coffee. And constantly you're switching, context switching into your emails, your instant messaging, your task at hand. Can anyone relate to that? Yes? I thought so. So as you're going juggling, we're juggling all of these tasks. And there are some days as an analyst I need to have focus time. And if I have to write up some complex requirements or I need some time to really just think, but I'm trying to also check my emails and take calls and answer all the instant messages, my time quickly goes away. And I find it's like 11 o'clock in the morning. I usually start quite early and I feel like I've got nothing accomplished. And then there are other days where it's much better. I know I have this focus time, so I actually run off Slack, close down the email. I set an hour and a half of time for myself and I actually can focus and get something done. The morning still flies by, but I feel a little bit better about what I've actually accomplished. So I'm actually a recovering multi-tasker. So I'm not saying here that multi-tasking is terrible and you should never do it. There are times when it's necessary, it's life. We just need to adapt. But what I do want to share the message today is you don't end up like this, just wanting to bury your head at the computer. And that really multi-tasking is something to be aware of to catch yourself when you're doing it. And hopefully it doesn't become a habit because we'll learn a little bit later what happens when you're constantly working at this fast pace and shifting from task to task to task. So what the research says, even though this is mostly about my own personal experience, I did want to make sure there was some research to back it up. This goes back to a study that was done in the American Psychological Association by David Myers and his colleagues. And so they studied participants in the 90s, early 2000s. So again, this is not brand new information. We know that multi-tasking is really not good for us when consistently done day after day. And even mental blocks, like even brief mental blocks can be seen by shifting between tasks. We can cost you as much as 40% of your time. So even if you're familiar with these tasks in this study, they set up a control group of people that were not going to multi-task. And another group of people who were self-proclaimed multi-taskers. And they asked them to perform a series of tasks. So one was solving simple math problems and classifying geometric shapes. And they had the two groups switch very rapidly for problem, geometric shape, solve the math problem, classify these shapes. Whereas the control group just focused on the math problems. And they found that even if they were very simple problems and the people were very skilled and knew what they were doing, they still lost time to context switching. As the problems got more complex, as you can probably guess, they lost even more time because they were in the middle, as I mentioned earlier, complex problem or writing requirements, you need to be in that flow of working and in that flow of really allowing your thoughts to go down one continuous path versus jumping around. So you may not feel like it, you may feel like you're getting a lot done, but you're actually slowly losing time. So how does this manifest in your day to day, in your body? Well for me personally, being a project manager, juggling multiple projects in an agency, and going having to get things done for deadlines of course, stress was starting to build up in my body. And I've worked at other companies in the past where maybe the project management has not been the best. So deadlines are very rapid. Can you turn this around to 24 hours? Somebody missed something. And that happens, I get it. But when that consistently happens and you're constantly reacting, some of these symptoms of stress, and there's physical, cognitive and emotional signs of stress but they can start to build up in your body. For me I was struggling with headaches. I was carrying a lot of tension in my shoulders in my jaw, I was grinding my teeth at night. And then eventually it led into stomach issues, just digestive problems. But I didn't put all of this together until I had to go to the doctor to say, you know what, I feel sick. And I was getting a lot of colds and my immune system was basically really run down. At that time the doctor said, oh you must be suffering from anxiety or depression. I was like, no way, I'm not depressed. And he said, well I'm going to give you antidepressants. And I said, okay I'll try it but I'm really uncomfortable with this. I tried it, it actually had adverse effect, it kept me up all night. And the headaches got worse. I wasn't dealing with the root of the problem which was my own self induced having to get everything done now and basically trying to do it all. So after a week of being on those antidepressants I stopped and I realized, okay this is actually something I can control. This is where the yoga came in. So this is going back quite a few years. At that time I'd been practicing for a number of years and I decided to go and quit my job. I left everything and went to India to pursue yoga teacher training. And that's where it took a bit more of a detour in my life but a turn for the best. I had the luxury of escaping, let's say, my responsibilities. I spent a month in an ashram in Northern India and really dove deeply into yoga and really started to learn about the mind body connection and how that my thoughts, my racing thoughts and having to tell myself I have to get this done and I have to get everything done now. We're leading to the physical symptoms in my body. So not everyone has the luxury to take off for a month and go and study yoga but there are some things that you can do even today and we're going to talk about that. The first thing is if you find yourself multitasking and you know you're not on a hard deadline, if you catch yourself I'd say just stop and realize that you're doing it. And it's not about beating yourself up and oh I'm doing it again because you know I still get caught up in it from time to time. I'm not going to beat myself up but when I do catch myself I just stop, take a quick break and then simply move on. Another thing you can do to help I get back into the flow and streamline your productivity is to eliminate distractions and that could be for example if you are in like an opposite situation even if you're working from home maybe put your cell phone away like out of view unless you need to be on some kind of an emergency or on-call situation you know I understand that but try to just remove the distractions even cleaning up clutter on your desk can help clear your mind. Another thing you can do is how many people have to-do lists here? And how many people have those to-do lists that just keep going and going and you don't really ever tick anything off of it? Yes I do too and sometimes it's you know it's something that's maybe not do right away but it's maybe not organized so I've taken time to organize my to-do lists and also make them action oriented. So for example if you're working on a project like Smith project and you look back at your to-do lists that's kind of meaningless you know it doesn't really help you remember even what you have to do on that project but if you say something like complete X deliverable on Smith project by you know October 30th that's a little more concrete and refined. So you can start to organize your list that way and push down those things and those tasks that are really not critical. And I feel that doing this it may sound so simple but it just helps me organize and it's not as overwhelming I can see okay well today I've only got maybe three things I really must do the rest can wait till the end of the week so it's all about prioritizing. It helps to take away some of those feelings of overwhelm. Another thing you can do is delegate so for those of you that are in a position even if you're not a manager you know we all work with teams typically there are other people on your team that can help you and assuming they're not overwhelmed but I think delegating is really good is finding those tasks that are easy to delegate and some people when I was talking with a friend about this the other day they said well it takes more time to delegate and explain the tasks to someone else I might as well do it myself. I said well yes that might be true either that's not the right task to delegate or maybe you don't trust this other person to get it done and while it might take a little bit of time up front to explain it once that person not only gains more experience if they start taking on other tasks they also after some time it takes that time away from you you have your time freed up now to get to those other things on your to-do list so you're really spreading the workload amongst your team and also especially if you're mentoring like a junior team you help people step up and learn and grow in their careers so really you don't have to do it all so some ways to reduce your stress so I think pretty much everybody raised their hand earlier and said they've experienced stress myself included so couple of simple tools here and this isn't I think it's not ground breaking you know earth shattering new information that you've never heard I'm quite sure but I'm here to remind you and that's really all it takes is to have a reminder to do these simple things in order to make your day go a little bit more smoothly so what you can do is set a benchmark for a break whether some people work differently I know some people like to have two, three hours solid they're just going to focus and get a task done that's totally fair just remember to take a break for me my limits about an hour to an hour and a half if I'm focusing on something that's requiring me to be very much in flow but I make a mental note if I have an open block of time where I don't have a lot of meetings try to get my meetings done in the morning and I know I've got an hour and a half to focus I know I'm going to take a break after five minutes and I'm going to just get up and move do something get a glass of water go for a quick walk even stretch and if you're one of those people that's kind of cringing when I'm saying this is like I don't have five minutes every hour to do this well then take two minutes take one minute even just something to move and do something different to switch your mind will help hydration is important as well it's even if you're slightly dehydrated it can affect your mental faculties and your ability to focus so remember to drink lots of water or orange juice another thing that's a great stress reducer is remembering to laugh more so how many of you work with a group of people and there's usually like one or two people in the office that you know you can just joke around with no matter what well you know what talk to that person don't see them as a distraction as they're taking me away from my work just have a laugh and it's really when you're laughing you're releasing endorphins it's taking away from all of this serious business of I've got to get everything done now another one and we've only got a few minutes left but I want to take this opportunity to do an exercise together and it's breathing deeply we were talking about this before the session started so when you're feeling stress and anxiety and you've been context switching all day your breathing chances are is in your chest and it's consolidated to this area which is okay for a short time but over time what you're telling your body is that you're in a state of stress or panic now in thousands of years ago you know the adrenal glands kick in when you're running away from a tiger let's say and you know your body's systems are there to warn you when you're in danger but it's not natural to be breathing that way and having the cortisol levels released from your adrenal glands every moment of every day so I want you to put down anything that's on your lap to set it aside sit up nice and straight place both of your feet firmly on the ground you're welcome to close your eyes or keep them open this will be about one minute or less and if you are feeling at all uncomfortable during this just return to normal breathing so when your eyes are closed or open rest your hands comfortably on your lap I want you to breathe in for a count of three so inhaling for one two three pause exhale for three two one now keep breathing along that time I want you to imagine you're filling up your lower belly with your breath then your rib cage then your chest as you pause imagine you're releasing the breath from your chest your rib cage and then your belly so just continue on for about another 30 seconds I'll let you know when your time is up just enjoy some deep breathing just relaxing your face releasing your jaw allowing your shoulders to drop and then together we're going to take a nice deep breath in filling fully with breath opening your eyes and then release is anyone still feeling stressed so it's a simple exercise it's just remembering to breathe and this is something that you can do anytime at any place you don't have to be in a yoga studio to do this you can do it right at your desk but it's just remembering to do it and hopefully you felt something different than before you did that breathing exercise hopefully you might feel a little bit more relaxed so with a couple of minutes left in summary we talked about multitasking how it's not good for you for your mental or physical health is in my experience hopefully you know the signs of stress pay attention next time you have a stomach ache headache you're feeling fatigued maybe you have a bug or maybe it's stress hopefully you remember some of those tools to jumpstart your productivity such as cleaning up your to-do list setting some goals delegating and hopefully remember if nothing else to breathe deeply and relax so if you have any questions we have about a one minute left before I think the next session gets started check how do you deal with back-to-back meetings since that's a good question she asked how do I deal with back-to-back meetings something we recently implemented at our company is to book if it's the one hour book for 50 minutes so you have a 10 minute breather in between and usually quite often I should say that you still get it that close to the hour so if it's from 10 to 11 you know it's 5 minutes to 11 usually I'm chairing these meetings so if you're the chair great if you're not maybe you can ask the chair to do time checks so to make sure that you do finish a few minutes early so you actually get that breathing time and that's something you can actually set in your Google calendar is a default to chop 10 minutes off or chop 5 minutes off the half hour meeting which tools do you use for to-do lists? Anything like you use in person or you just amend them? To-do what's very the oh to-do lists everything I have is in Evernote and we also use Basecamp as well for our client communications and I hand write a lot too you're welcome alright folks we're at time thank you so much for joining me