Originally appeared on: http://web.archive.org/web/20220528045728/https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/productivity/time-management/the-art-of-monotasking-vs-multitasking
Monotasking isn’t just efficient, it’s a mental health exercise.
August 28, 2018
Burning Man is a “leave no trace” event. That means exactly what it sounds like. Every single thing you bring in, you take out. Everything. Every can. Every wrapper. You even collect and evaporate your waste water.
While this sounds like a lot of work, it’s actually an un-frickin-believable amount of work. And that’s a good thing, because it’s the perfect environment to uncover a deep truth about how humans operate.
Humans Have Flow
When you’re brushing your teeth at Burning Man, you have to put all your attention on brushing. How will you wet your toothbrush without getting any water on the playa? Where will you spit? How will you rinse your mouth? In daily life, we have sinks and plumbing to take care of all that. But at Burning Man, none of that exists. So you put your full attention on brushing your teeth. You think through every moment. You account for everything. You enter a state of flow.
When we have to put our full attention on something, our brains quiet down. Everything goes away except that one thing. And we then do it, and get it done. And we enjoy the process.
Society Has Multitasking
Nothing could be farther from how we live our lives in so-called civilization, however. We multitask. That means we try to split our attention between several things at once.
Multitasking Causes Delays
If you multitask. You twaddle for 10 minutes, mush for five, and repeat over and over. You’ll finish at minute 90. The turnips will be done twaddling at minute 85, and the tomatoes will be done at minute 90. And the whole time, you were mentally hopping back and forth between the tasks.
Monotasking Gets Results Sooner
Instead of alternating, you could also do all the turnip twaddling and when you’re done, do all the tomato mushing. The two together take 90 minutes. But with monotasking, the turnips are done at minute 60—25 minutes sooner than when multitasking. The tomatoes are still done at minute 90. And there was no need to make your brain skip back and forth between the two.
Monotasking took the same amount of time. Monotasking finished one task 25 minutes sooner. And, most importantly, monotasking didn’t require you to keep switching tasks.
Monotasking Promotes Mindfulness
Eliminating the back-and-forth of task switching is key. Let your brain focus on one thing and one thing only: whatever is right in front of you.
You’ll be able to bring 100% of yourself to the problem at hand, and without thrashing back and forth, you’ll be able to notice if you get off track and make schedule or scope adjustments as needed.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the Get-it-Done Guy podcast, an iTunes top-10 business podcast, from 2007 to 2020. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science from MIT.
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