Defragment your time!

I was analyzing my own time-spending pattern over the last few years. The trend I observed seems to be generic with all people. Not so long ago, I was spending quite a bit amount of contiguous time towards task at hand. When I was a student, I used to sit for lectures for hours together. I used to write assignments at a longer stretch.

As I have started working professionally, I see myself multi-tasking a lot. Side-effect of multi-tasking is that I spend very little contiguous time towards task at hand and switch to something else very quickly. This is common trend with the whole world. Followers on twitter are increasing at exponential rate. Followers on the blogs are not increasing so fast.

Multi-tasking has its own advantages but the biggest disadvantage is that I am getting less and less involved in the task I am doing. This also effects the concentration levels. It also affects the ability to give 100% for long period. This has kind of annoying effect and it becomes more difficult to enjoy the work I am doing.

It has quite an interesting analogy to fragmentation problem in computers . In computers, disk fragmentation happens when sectors belonging to the same file are dispersed all over the disk. Because of this, it becomes inefficient to gather the contents of a file. As a solution, you can run de-fragmentation utilities to improve performance.

Sadly, there are no de-fragmentation utilities for time. All you can do is allocate your time in such a way that you give a significant amount of contiguous block to each task. I agree that some people can handle more tasks at the same time (just as some computers have more cores than others :)). The challenge is to know your own multi-tasking ability and give a contiguous amount of time to a set of tasks you can handle simultaneously.

This is a kind of thing that most people know. But they ignore it quite a lot. Even I was ignoring it for quite a while. I think it's about time to de-fragment the time.:)