One morning, I had to walk my dogs alone, since my wonderful wife was out of town.  At first, I popped my headphones in and started listening to Comedy Central.  But for some reason after I walked out of my home's Wi-Fi range, the signal crapped out, and so I was met with silence.  Rather than drag my phone out of my pocket, I just walked with the silence, and after a couple of minutes of consciously enjoying the sun and view of the lakes and my cute dogs, my brain popped out the answer to a complicated problem I'd been thinking about for a couple of days. Eureka!

This reminded me of what we've been talking about in our Getting Focused for Entrepreneurs class. Multitasking is not real, our brains only work on one thing at a time, and when we switch activities we lose time and focus. One of the points we discussed was that even listening to music with words (much less a comedy routine) causes part of your brain to focus on the words rather than whatever else is at hand.

However, I often prefer to do focus work while listening to music. I am reminded that I should put Beethoven instead of Def Leppard on my focus-work playlists, or just use one of the many focus playlists on Spotify.

-Scott

P.S. We are running the Getting Focused for Entrepreneurs class again starting July 9.  Click here for more info about the class or to sign up.