We used to think we were good at multitasking. We were proud of it. We’d eat lunch while answering emails while half-listening to a podcast, and we’d tell ourselves we were being efficient. What we were actually doing was doing three things badly and enjoying none of them.
The moment we really understood single tasking wasn’t at a desk. It was last summer, when we were chopping an onion for dinner. We were also mentally rehearsing an email, and we cut our finger. Not badly — a nick, a band-aid. But it stopped us. We were standing in our kitchen holding a knife, and we weren’t even there. Our body was chopping and our mind was in an inbox.
That’s the whole problem in one sentence: we’re almost never where we are.
Notice When You’re Splitting Yourself
The first step to single tasking isn’t willpower. It’s noticing. For a week, we kept a tiny tally in a notebook. Every time we caught ourselves doing two things at once — scrolling our phone while eating, thinking about work while talking to our partner, opening a new tab in the middle of writing — we made a mark.
We stopped counting after the first day because the number was embarrassing. Something like forty marks. Forty moments where our attention was split, and we hadn’t even noticed until we started paying attention to it.
This is the honest caveat: you can’t just decide to stop. The habit of splitting yourself is deep, and it’ll fight you. For the first few days of doing one thing at a time, we felt genuinely anxious, like we were forgetting something, like we were wasting time. We weren’t. Our brain just missed the stimulation.
Pick One Thing and Name It Out Loud
Here’s the practical version that finally worked for us. Before we start something, we say what it is — out loud, or in our head if there are people around. “we’re writing this one email.” “we’re folding the laundry.” “we’re reading this chapter.”
Naming it does two things. First, it turns a vague blob of “stuff to do” into a single, finite thing with a beginning and an end. Second, it makes the drift visible. When we’re supposed to be folding laundry and we reach for our phone, the phone isn’t part of what we named. So we notice the moment we reach for it.
The reason this works where vague intentions fail is that it gives you a line to come back to. You drift, everyone drifts, but if you’ve named the thing, you can catch the drift within seconds instead of losing twenty minutes to it. That’s the whole game, really — not never drifting, but noticing quickly and returning.
Give the Task a Home, Not Just a Time
Multitasking usually happens because a task doesn’t have a clear place to live. You’re writing a report, but you remember you need to call the dentist, so you call the dentist mid-sentence, and then you remember you need to pay a bill, and suddenly it’s an hour later and the report has two paragraphs.
The fix is a parking lot. We keep a single list — just a piece of paper or a note on our phone — and anything that pops into our head while we’re working goes there instead of being acted on. “Call dentist.” “Pay electric bill.” “Reply to Marcus.” Write it down, go back to the report.
This felt stupid the first week. Our brain would throw up a thought and we’d think, no, we should just do it now while we remember. But that’s the trap. “Just do it now” is how the day dissolves into fragments.
Let the Hard Thing Take as Long as It Takes
Single tasking also means giving up on the fantasy that you can compress everything. We once tried to “multitask” reading a book and going for a walk — audiobook, sure — and we realized afterward we’d retained almost nothing of either the walk or the book. The trees we passed, the chapters we heard, all gone into a blur.
Now, when we go for a walk, we walk. When we read, we sit and read. When we cook, we cook. Nothing else. It is slower. That’s the point. You can’t rush presence.
But here’s what we’ve noticed after a few months of this: our days don’t feel shorter. They feel longer. An hour of one thing leaves a mark on us that an hour of three things never did. Start small. One thing. Named out loud. A place to put the thoughts that try to interrupt. The knife stays where it is, your mind stays where you are, and for once, the onion just gets chopped.