I gave up multitasking by accident. There was no productivity book involved. I didn't go on a retreat. I didn't make a rule for myself, post a note above the desk, install an app. I just noticed, slowly, over a few months, that the things I was doing came out better when I was only doing one of them, and that doing one of them was, on its own, more enjoyable than I'd let it be for years. By the time I realized this had become a way of working, it had become a way of living too. I was, without quite meaning to, a person who did one thing at a time.
It is harder to explain than I expected, because the language we have for this is mostly the language of self-improvement. Single-tasking. Deep work. Monotasking. All of these terms, for good reason, treat single-tasking as a discipline you impose on yourself in order to extract more output. That isn't quite my experience. My experience is closer to this: I stopped multitasking, and the days got longer in a good way, and I didn't really get more done, but I felt much less like the day was something happening to me.
What multitasking actually felt like
Most of what I called multitasking, when I was doing it, was not really doing two things at once. It was doing one thing at maybe seventy percent attention while the other thirty percent was scanning for something more interesting. I'd be on a call but reading email. I'd be writing but with three tabs open in the background, ready to switch when the writing got hard. I'd be cooking dinner but watching half a video. I'd be talking to my partner but checking the phone, in the way I now find unforgivable when other people do it to me.
The official story I told myself was that I was being efficient. I was, I thought, getting more done. The actual truth was that I was getting the same things done in the same time, but with a constant low-grade exhaustion that I had assumed was just what being an adult felt like.
What changed first
The first thing that changed was cooking. I started cooking with no podcast. This was originally because I was making a recipe I didn't know well and I needed to actually pay attention to the timings. But what I noticed, by the third or fourth time, was that the cooking was different — sharper, somehow more present — and the meal at the end was different too. It tasted more like cooking and less like a podcast that had happened to produce dinner.
I'd thought the podcast was making the cooking enjoyable. The podcast was, in fact, making the cooking forgettable. Without the podcast, the cooking was the thing the cooking was for. It was its own pleasure. I'd been overlaying it for years with someone else's voice, and the cooking had been receding under that voice for as long as I could remember.
I'd thought the podcast was making the cooking enjoyable. The podcast was making the cooking forgettable.
From there it spread, slowly. I started taking calls without doing anything else. I started reading without checking my phone every two pages. I started writing without three tabs open. Each of these was, individually, a tiny adjustment. Together they were a different kind of life.
What single-tasking is not
It is not focus, exactly. Focus implies straining toward something, holding your attention to a specific point against resistance. Single-tasking is gentler. It's something more like permission — permission for one thing to be the thing, for now, until I'm done with it or it's done with me.
It is also not productivity. The output, in my case, has not measurably increased. I get about the same amount of writing and translating done as I did before. I think this is partly because I was already pretty efficient, and partly because the gains from single-tasking show up in the quality of the work, not the quantity. Things I write now have fewer dropped threads. Translations need fewer revision passes. The work is, on average, less wrong.
And it is not about removing distraction. The distractions are still there. The phone is still nearby. The browser still has fourteen tabs. The difference is that I'm no longer reaching for them in the middle of doing something else. They are, increasingly, things I do between things, not during things.
The strangest benefit
The strangest benefit, the one I didn't expect at all, is that the day feels longer. Not that I'm getting more hours; I'm not. It's that each hour, in retrospect, has more in it. When I cook with my full attention, that's twenty minutes of cooking. When I cook with a podcast playing, that's twenty minutes of I cooked something while listening to a thing, and I remember neither very well.
Single-tasking, weirdly, does not slow down time in the moment. It feels normal. But it deposits more in memory. The day, looking back at it, contains more, even though I did the same number of things. This is the closest I've come to actually understanding what people mean when they say a slow life is a longer life. I don't think they mean you live longer. I think they mean you remember more.
How to start, briefly
I won't make this prescriptive. But for what it's worth, the entry point that worked for me was the smallest possible task: drinking a cup of coffee with nothing else going on. Not eating breakfast at the same time. Not reading the news. Not on the way somewhere. Just sitting with the cup for the time it takes to drink the cup.
I did this for maybe ten days before I started doing it with anything else. It is shockingly hard at first, in a way that is itself a useful piece of information about how you've been spending your attention. But it is also, very quickly, the most pleasant ten minutes of the day. From there it spreads on its own, because once you've felt what it's like, you start noticing how rarely you let yourself feel it.
I would like to say single-tasking is a practice. I don't think it's quite a practice. It is closer to a way of treating one's own attention with a little more respect — the same way you might treat a guest you actually wanted to see, instead of one you were tolerating while you checked your phone. The work I do is better. The food I eat is better. The conversations I have are better. None of these were broken before. They were all just being half-eaten, by me, while I did something else.