Multitasking: How to make you happier and make the time more productive; and a life-changing speech by Jim Carrey.

When multitasking makes you happy and when it doesn't.  

     Do you ever find yourself multitasking too often? A recent study by Jordin Etkin and Cassie Mogilner published in the Harvard Business Review discovered when multitasking makes you happy and when it doesn't.

They conducted a series of experiments with a broad-range of participants and then measured how happy they felt while performing tasks. You can take three minutes and read about the specifics of what they measured here.

Here are their findings: 

"Whereas participants expected that more variety would always make them happier, when looking back, more variety only made them happier for sufficiently long periods of time - like over a day, a week, or a month. Over short time periods, like 10 minutes or an hour, more varied activities actually made people less happy." 

So what are the practical implications?

"Schedule varied activities throughout your day, week, and month but make sure that you remove variety from your hours and minutes." That is, leave the cell phone alone while you are cooking dinner but don't cook the same thing every night. 

"But sometimes I HAVE to do two things at once."

If that is the case, try to think of tasks collectively: Instead of thinking "I need to get my science homework done, study for my math test and prepare for my english presentation", group it into "get my homework done." Similarly for adults, don't think of getting your kids ready in the morning as "cook breakfast and make sure they are dressed while they have the right shoes on and permission slips are signed and the right folders are in the right bags and we are out on time to beat traffic." Instead, think about getting the kids ready collectively as "'getting ready tasks'" instead of thinking about how many tasks that you need to get done. According to Etkin and Mogliner's research, thinking about tasks collectively "will make you happier and the time feel more productive." 

To conclude, leave the cell phone alone while you are cooking dinner but don't cook the same thing every night. It may sound  like common sense, but take a step back and reflect on how recently you were engaged at doing two different things in the same short span of time and think about your level of productivity and satisfaction. 

Access the full article by clicking here. 

Jim Carrey's commencement address at Maharishi University of Management. 

     This speech is absolutely brilliant. It's the perfect mix of clever, hilarious, and life-changing packed into an incredible 26 minutes. Worth the time, no doubt about it. [However, if you're really pressed for time, I included the three most powerful quotes from the speech below the video].

(original video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V80-gPkpH6M)

Here are the three most powerful quotes from the speech (in my opinion):

"Our eyes are not viewers, they are also projectors that are running a second story over the picture that we see in front of us all the time. Fear is writing that script, and the working title is 'I'll never be enough'"

"As far as I can tell it's just about letting the universe know what you want and working toward it, while letting go of how it comes to pass." 

"Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world."