What is monotasking?
The concept of monotasking is pretty simple: do one thing at a time with your full attention.
However, monotasking in the world we live in is harder than it seems. We are constantly tempted to multitask - by our long to-do lists, by our devices, and by our own brains.
So, how do we monotask? We need to train our monotasking muscles.
The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better provides an easy to follow plan for building monotasking muscles in everyday activities
The 12 monotasks Thatcher writes about in the book are: Reading, Walking, Listening, Sleeping, Eating, Getting There, Learning, Teaching, Playing, Seeing, Creating, and Thinking
Practice these with your full attention (monotask them!) and you will be able to call upon your monotasking muscles whenever you need them for any task at home, at work, or in others parts of your life.
Strong monotasking muscles will help you pay attention, be more present, and more connected to other people.
You will be more productive, less stressed, and happier in all that you do!
1. READING
Reading focuses our eyes and our brains in one place. By putting down our phones and picking up a book, we are choosing to monotask. Though the material we read may take our minds in many directions, the act of focused reading forces us to concentrate on the subject at hand. Reading is one of the most powerful monotasks for today’s technological world.
2. WALKING
While it may seem like a simple activity, many people view walking as a means to an end, not the end in itself. By focusing attention of our surroundings - what we see, hear and feel, we naturally connect with our overall presence in the world. As an essential monotask, walking can bring an experiential awareness of our environment more than other forms of physical exercise.
3. LISTENING
Listening connects us to others, engaging our auditory senses and our brains. When we truly listen, we connect to people and absorb information infinitely better than when our minds are distracted trying to multitask thoughts and actions.
4. SLEEPING
Sleeping resets our bodies and our brains so that we can do more tomorrow than we did today. It also provides an essential method for our brains to expand, internalize and codify our experiences in the world. Bringing focused attention to sleep can have benefits that permeate throughout our lives.
5. EATING
Food fuels our bodies, nourishes our souls and can provide connection to our families and communities. By monotasking eating we bring our attention to the fundamentals of where our food comes from and the systems that supplies it, focusing us on the essential aspects of nourishment beyond just the meal at the table.
6. GETTING THERE
Commuting, driving, traveling - we all have places to go and it often seems that the time spent is the ultimate environment for multi-tasking. Breaking out the activity of moving from one place to another and truly focusing on the journey and enjoying its experience can be an enormously centering exercise that allows us to experience being totally present.
7. LEARNING
Learning is a lifelong endeavor. A new language, a sport, a piece of music or something related to our work; the ability to bring our focus to one thing at a time improves our capacity to learn and allows us to more fully experience one of the most invigorating aspects of being human - making new cognitive and emotional connections.
8. TEACHING
Teaching strengthens our brains and builds our connections to others. Preparation to teach requires intense focus and recognition of the limitations of our own knowledge. This monotask explores both the practical elements and the emotional aspects of mastering a subject to convey it to others.
9. PLAYING
Playing involves letting go of much of the concentraion required for our myriad of daily tasks, relaxing our brains and fully inhabiting our bodies. Modern society is very busy and many people don’t allow themselves time to play. Often we feel guilty when we take time for ourselves or feel we are wasting our time if we are not being productive nor “monetizing” our time.
10. SEEING
Seeing integrates our visual senses. Yet too often our cell phones and cameras and instagram shots prevent us from actually experiencing the subjects we are trying to capture. By monotasking seeing, we allow ourselves to truly absorb the depth of our visual world in all of its beauty and complexity.
11. CREATING
The act of bringing something into the world that did not exist before is rewarding and we all have the power to create. Be it as small as a note to our children or as large as a startup company or a symphony, creating is one of the most magical and empowering of life’s endeavors. This monotask will teach you the power of focusing on the creative process for a better understanding of your whole world.
12. THINKING
Most of us never think about thinking because we are doing it nonstop. Isolating thinking as a monotask on its own brings our attention to where we have outsourced our thinking to devices and influencers, and how we can reclaim some of our most important cognitive processing tasks.
The Twelve Monotasks
by Thatcher Wine.
Life is busy, and we all have a lot to do, right? We do what we can to get it all done using a variety of tips, tricks, hacks, and devices. But wasn’t it the original promise of our technology that it would help us get more done efficiently, improve our work quality and leave us with more leisure time to enjoy our lives?
Neurological research has concluded that there is a bottleneck in our cognitive function - when we do more than one thing at a time, we become less efficient and more error-prone. The word “multi-tasking”, first used in the mid 1960’s to describe how computers could perform multiple tasks at one time, has become a catchall concept of our current society, where our lives and activities are determined by the ever-increasing influence of technology in our daily lives.
In The Twelve Monotasks, published by Little, Brown Spark, Thatcher Wine outlines 12 tasks that form the foundation of our lives, and offers a roadmap and training manual to recapture some of the control and awareness we have lost along the way. Each of the twelve tasks and how they build connections between our brains, bodies, senses, and the world we live in, are unique. The monotasking muscles in our brains that we can build and train with these initial tasks can be applied to just about any activity or area of our lives we want in the future.