No, I'm not crazy. And no, I don't mean you should have a closed mind all the time.

What I do mean is that to be most productive, you need to close your mind to everything except the project at hand. In otherwords, don't multitask.

Multitasking keeps you from being as productive as you could be. It makes projects take longer and it keeps you from spending focused time working on your business.

Here's why: when you multitask your mind is jumping from place to place.

Sure, you think multitasking is saving you time. You can check out the news while your email is loading, answer your email during the morning conference call, and print out fliers while you're researching keywords to use in the ad campaign for that new product.

But, gee, there's an interesting story in the news, and you surf the web to find a bit more information on it. Or, your favorite blogger mentions a web site, and you click the link to take a quick peak peek. And you find something about a competitor on that site, and click another link… and a half hour passes before you get back to the email - or to researching those keywords. Then, the ink runs out in the printer and you don't have any more, so you run out to the office supply store to buy some. And you accidentally shut down the computer forgetting that you had pulled up some keywords you wanted to save.

And so it goes all day. Eventually you get the fliers printed, and read and answer your email. And answer a few phone calls. And maybe do a bit of other work. But somehow it gets to be 5 pm and you didn't get back to creating that list of keywords… and you didn't get a bunch of other things done that you wanted to.

The solution: Stop multitasking. Choose the most important thing to do for the day, and then do it, devoting full attention to it. Then, when that's done, move on to the next task.

You'll be surprised how much more you get done by closing your mind to everything but the task at hand.

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