Work without multitasking

Honest-to-freaking-God, I don’t want to stop working. There’s no reason to retire. Working is rewarding, and I’m still capable of being creative and useful. Why would I let all that experience and creativity go to waste?

I’ll tell you what I’m letting go of.

Multitasking.

My workload now is set up so that I can work on one thing at a time.

The clients and projects aren’t sequential. That would be tedious and involve lots of waiting.

But on any given day I might spend a few hours on project A and a few hours on project B — and be able to fully concentrate on each project while I’m working on it.

I enter a flow state, I know the destination, I have the power at my fingertips. And I motor through until the work is not just done, but done to perfection.

Then I take a break, have a snack, take a walk, answer a few emails, write a blog post, or whatever, and then resume work on the next project.

The overhead is minimal. Every few days I send out an invoice that I create in Microsoft Word and track in Google Docs.

There are very few meetings. I tend to show up on Zoom a few minutes early and linger a few minutes late, watching the frazzled people going from meeting to meeting. Everything else happens by email — and I’m right on top of that between projects because I’m not oversubscribed and multitasking all the time.

Slack? Microsoft Teams? Nah, don’t need any of that crap — and nobody expects it of me.

Some good things about working this way

This makes me happy because I can concentrate and don’t need to compromise.

It makes the clients happy because my full concentration generates excellent work.

It makes my bank account happy because that level of high quality work is something people are happy to pay for.

It makes my family happy because when I’m with them I’m not worrying about work that’s hanging over my head.

So now I only have one question.

If AI can take care of some of the drudgery and management, could everybody work this way?

There’s a future worth pursuing!