The Task At Hand

  Governance   ProjectsAtWork  

“To do two things at once is to do neither”  -– Publilius Syrus

Picture the following scenario: you have gone into a “quiet room” such as your office or den to write a long-term program or project plan that you have been meaning to get to for several weeks. The plan requires your full concentration, and it has taken you say three plus weeks to get to because of short-term issues and urgent requests from others that have continually taken priority.

‘Today’ is the first day you have managed to budget or decided to set aside time to work on it. You are fifteen minutes into your task, but you find yourself struggling to concentrate on it. Your mind wanders. Then you see an email come into the Inbox on your computer and also your mobile device, which you have put on the desk in full view – both flash at you with the new message alert. Without thinking twice, you open the email, digest its contents and click Reply. Upon finishing your response, you check something loosely related to it that you were working on last week…and in the space of twenty minutes you are disconnected mentally from writing the plan you set yourself the task of completing today… does scenario this seem all to familiar?

Take a moment to consider how much of your time at work you spend responding to ad-hoc tasks while having multiple …

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