Singletasking

Get More Done—One Thing at a Time

Devora Zack

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626562639
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Time Management

"Can literally double your productivity and performance overnight. This may be the most important book on time and personal management you will ever read." —Brian Tracy, international bestselling author of Eat That Frog! Your mind can't be two places at once. Too many of us have become addicted to the popular, enticing, dangerously misleading drug of multitasking. Devora Zack was once hooked herself. But she beat it and became more efficient, and you can too. Zack marshals convincing neuroscientific evidence to prove that you really can't do more by trying to tackle several things at once—it's an illusion. There is a better way to deal with all the information and interruptions that bombard us today. Singletasking explains exactly how to clear and calm your mind, arrange your schedule and environment, and gently yet firmly manage the expectations of people around you so that you can accomplish a succession of tasks, one by one—and be infinitely more productive. Singletasking is the secret to success and sanity. "Devora Zack shows us how doing one thing at a time reduces stress, increases efficiency, and produces higher quality results. If you want to work smarter, not harder, read this book!" —Ken Blanchard, #1 New York Times -bestselling coauthor of The One Minute Manager® "Don't let Zack's lighthearted tone fool you— Singletasking is backed by hard science, and this book's pragmatic advice can really change your work and your life." —David Bach, #1 New York Times -bestselling author of The Automatic Millionaire "Zack shows readers how they can manage the expectations of others, unplug from technology (at times), and operate in the moment." — Library Journal

PART ONE
Reclaim Your Life

Things which matter most must never be at the expense of things which matter least.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

1

The Multitasking Myth

MYTH

I’m great at multitasking.

REALITY

Multitasking is neurologically impossible.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

EPICTETUS

Multitasking fails us.

Let me take that one step further. Multitasking doesn’t even exist. We’ll circle back to this alarming yet scientifically backed claim later.

Why are so many people drawn into the albatross of multitasking? We are collectively thwarted by modern-day plagues such as:

Too much to do, too little time

Cluttered life, cluttered mind

Growing piles of daily demands

A whirlwind of distractions

Nooo! [Cue eerie Halloween music.]

This list is the tip of the iceberg. Go ahead; brainstorm a few dozen examples of your own. I’ll wait here, tapping my foot, growing ever more anxious that I’m wasting my irreplaceable time.

When you return, check out how one guy I interviewed described multitasking in daily life: “What is the impact of multitasking when looking at text messages while driving? Reading the newspaper while talking on the phone to colleagues? Watching NFL Live when your wife wants to talk about schedules? You run into the car ahead of you, agree to finish a project before it can possibly be done, and schedule a business trip on your father-in-law’s birthday.”

In a fruitless effort to compensate for the tsunami we call our lives, we try to tackle several tasks at once … making distracted living rampant. We lose concentration, heighten stress, and senselessly fret over items unrelated to the task at hand. We are relentlessly disrespectful to the people right in front of us—colleagues, customers, vendors, employees, cohorts, and our own family.

Fragmented attention (aka multitasking) fractures results and foils relationships.

A Monster in Our Midst

What makes multitasking so enticing?

We know of the dangers of texting and driving, yet many of us still do it. How can we circumvent distraction? Why is it so difficult to immerse ourselves in a single task at a time? Because lurking around every turn is what I call the multitask monster. Many are thwarted by this compelling creature.

One of his primary tricks is pulling our attention toward unrelated obligations as we work. He looms over our desks, lumbering around our workplace, two heads recklessly swinging in opposite directions, daring us to focus on one over the other. As we stare in despair at our stealthily expanding in-box, the multitask monster soothingly whispers into our ears the Sole Solution: “Tackle two, three, four at once! It is your only hope.”

Worse, seemingly everyone else has taken on the multitask monster as a revered guide, responding to his every beck and call.

Resist! Stop the madness! Gather your resilience and kick that multitask monster out the door. Multitask monsters are like ocean sirens luring sailors to disaster—though notably less well groomed.

What if I asked you to banish the multitask monster for one day? Could you do it? What would stop you? Can you give it a go? What results will you reap?

One client reflected, “I’ve always prided myself on being a multitasker over the years, but if I were to do honest self-evaluation today, I realize there are pitfalls to all this madness!”

Another acknowledged, “When I do more than one thing at a time I never do anything particularly well.”

The hard fact is that attempting to multitask correlates with low productivity.¹ By definition, doing more than one thing at a time means you are distracted. The only way to do anything particularly well—or, let’s raise the bar, spectacularly well—is through full task engagement. As I heard a father sagely explain to his son, a newly minted college grad, “At any given time, you can do one thing well or two things poorly.”

The Allure of Distraction

We are distracted. This does not serve us well.

Don’t blame yourself entirely. Cultural expectations—based on technological advances—have resulted in unrealistic demands. We are expected to absorb a torrent of information from a plethora of media without pause. We are to be constantly accessible.

Many of us react to the alarming pile of demands by splitting our focus among tasks. We are in the midst of an increasing trend toward what Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention”—giving superficial, simultaneous attention to competing streams of information.² Living in our own personal big bang, we feel unable to keep pace with the frenetically expanding universe encircling our lives. Again and again I hear, “The more I try to keep up, the more overwhelmed I become.”

A slew of people suffer from the misconception that multitasking is necessary to cope with task overload. This always backfires.

Multitasking is misleading. Rather than mitigating demands, it magnifies our problems. Our brains are incapable of honing in on more than one item at a time.

Multitasking blocks the flow of information into short-term memory. Data that doesn’t make it into short-term memory cannot be transferred into long-term memory for recall. Therefore, multitasking lowers our ability to accomplish tasks.

We are losing our ability to focus. We are scattered. We are impolite. We cause—and suffer from—accidents. We are unproductive. We relinquish control. We pretend to multitask.

Why did I say “pretend”? Because multitasking doesn’t exist! I’ll keep sneaking in this factoid until you’re ready to hear it. It’s make-believe! Think Zeus throwing lightning bolts. Or Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Everybody Loves a Neuroscientist

As any neighborhood neuroscientist will attest, the brain can only focus on one thing at a time.

Allow me to expand. The brain is incapable of simultaneously processing separate streams of information from attention-demanding tasks. What we conversationally reference as multitasking is technically called task-switching—moving rapidly and ineffectively among tasks.

As Dr. Eyal Ophir, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, explains, “Humans don’t really multitask, we task-switch … switch[ing] very quickly between tasks.” Although this feels like multitasking, the brain is incapable of focusing on two things at once. Plus, performance suffers as attention shifts back and forth.³

Not only that, get a load of this from Dr. Earl Miller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “You cannot focus on one [task] while doing [an]other. That’s because of what’s called interference between the two tasks.… People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves. The brain is very good at deluding itself.”⁴

To recap, actual multitasking is not possible, and what is commonly labeled as ...