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Everyone goes crazy these days about time management.

We create to-do lists and schedule all kind of tasks in order to make sure we take advantage of all the time we have at our disposal to do more while also relaxing and doing the things we like.

But most of the time all those little "tricks" and "tips" about how to manage everything in order to have more free hours in a day usually fail and we're stuck trying to figure out how the hell others finish hours of work in just a few minutes while we're stuck completing one task in half a day.

One of the main reasons we do this wrong is because we focus too much on controlling time and how we use it, and too little on what we invest our attention on and how productive we are in the little time we have available.

We live in the era of information and communication and because of that we feel, more and more often, obligated to focus our attention on multiple things at the same time in order to do everything faster and better. That's called "multitasking".

I'm sure most of you heard of that by now. Why focus on writing an article and then replying to 5 e-mails when you can do both at the same time and be done with it faster?

While that sounds great in theory, in practice it only leads to energy wasted and more time invested into switching between tasks rather than work itself. The reason for that is because your brain needs some time and energy to focus on one task. It may seem instant to you, but it takes some considerable effort.

When you have to take care of two things at once, your brain has to constantly switch between those things, access a bunch of information you need and that leads to fatigue really quick.

But when we decide to focus on only one thing, it's easier for the brain to take care of that task.

This doesn't only apply to working on two things at once, but everything you do that requires you to constantly change focus. For example, if right now you're working on something and you receive a message on Facebook, you may think "It doesn't hurt to answer to this person, it only takes 2 minutes!"

Do that 5 times and you'll spend 10 minutes talking to someone instead of working. It's the same when we watch a video, when we're on Twitter and we check what people shared every 5 minutes and so on. Even if you don't stop what you do to answer that message or check what someone shared, the thought will be there and it will decrease productivity.

Then we wonder why can't we finish our tasks in a short amount of time like other people who are a lot more successful than us.

Learning how to manage our attention and how to focus on one thing at the time is crucial. There are distractions everywhere that constantly require your attention and that leads to wasted time and not a lot of progress being made.
 
Once you learn how to focus on what's important, how to not multitask and how to avoid being distracted by anything, you'll see how easy will be to complete your tasks in a short amount of time, this way liberating more hours every day for you to relax and have fun.