Great Teachers Don’t Multitask (and other things I learned in school)

©Thatcher Wine

Have you ever seen a teacher reading texts on their phone while teaching a class? Or scrolling through a dating app, responding to an email, or multitasking in some other form at the head of the class? I hope not!

Great teachers give us their full attention. It’s hard enough to teach. Once you throw in other things to think about and do at the same time, teaching becomes much more difficult bordering on impossible.

In my book The Twelve Monotasks - Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better, I have a chapter about teaching and in it, I make clear that monotasking teaching is for everyone, not just for professional teachers.

We can all use teaching to build our monotasking muscles. Why? Because it takes so much of our attention, that it does two things:

• Helps us reclaim our ability to focus on anything and everything in life.

• Helps us better learn what we are teaching.

Give teaching a try in your daily life, and don’t try to multitask while you do it.

You can teach in person, or by recording a video, or by writing instructions down. You can teach something small (the best time to go to the grocery store!) or something big (how to write a novel.) Whatever you teach, give it your full attention.