Monotasking vs. Multitasking
“The shorter way to do many things is to only do one thing at a time.” – Mozart.
Is multitasking really even possible?
According to research by David L. Strayer, PhD, and Jason M. Watson, PhD, cognitive neuroscientists from the University of Utah and the University of Colorado Denver, only 2.5 percent of the population may actually be able to perform multiple tasks at once without a decline in their abilities. For the other 97.5 percent of us, research has shown that the more tasks we take on at once, the more errors we tend to make, and the less efficient we become.
I think of multitasking as more of an attempt to do more than one thing at a time than an actual practice. In reality, one of two things happen when you try to multitask:
Background tasking: You do one thing with your brain while one or more things happen in the background. For example, my primary task right now is typing this blog post. My background task is listening to quiet music.
Task switching: For more cognitively demanding tasks, you switch from one task to another, often losing a lot of time, energy, and quality in the process. If a call I need to take comes in while I’m writing this blog post, I switch tasks and take the call, then I switch back to writing. If I attempt to do both at the same time, my writing suffers, and the person on the phone can likely tell I’m not paying full attention.
Monotasking means doing only one task at a time with our full attention.
We’ve gotten so used to attempted multitasking in our lives (a lot of it enabled by our phones and other technologies) that it may feel uncomfortable at first to only do one thing at a time.
But if we strip away everything until we have one thing left, we can become more familiar with that feeling and we can make better monotasking vs. multitasking decisions.
By taking away background tasks and reducing the frequency of our task switching, we will strengthen our “monotasking muscles.”
We can then use those monotasking muscles to resist distractions throughout our lives. And we will know when we can add background tasks back to our activities without reducing the quality of what we do, just as I did when deciding to listen to music while writing this post. I also put my phone on Do Not Disturb and out of reach (I can still see it if my kids’ schools call or there is an emergency.)
Monotasking can help us be more productive and it also provides tremendous benefits in reducing stress. Our attempts to multitask tend to make us feel overwhelmed, whereas being present in the moment and doing one thing at a time, makes us feel good. When we monotask, whatever we are hearing, seeing, creating, feeling, or thinking, we can experience it with our full attention and truly do everything better.
I monotasked the writing of The Twelve Monotasks! There was no other way to get it done and test out all the concepts I wanted to share with the world. I look forward to hearing what you monotask and how it works for you.