Monday Focus Check

There’s no such thing as multitasking, only fast switching that costs you

Tried to answer an email while my daughter told me about her dream this morning. Nailed neither one. Sent a half-sentence that made no sense and missed the part where the dog could talk, which was apparently the whole point of the dream. She clocked that I wasn’t really there. Kids always do.

We love the word multitasking. The brain flips between two things, fast, and on each switch, it costs us time. It never truly runs both at once. Psychologists have measured that tax for years, and it’s why you can tear around busy all morning and finish with nothing you’d point to. You spent the morning paying tolls and calling it work.

So Monday is the day I try to run one thing at a time on purpose. One thing, all the way through, before I pick up the next. Write with the browser closed. Have the conversation with the phone face down in the other room. It feels slower in the moment but it finishes far more, which took me an embarrassingly long time to believe.

The trap is that switching feels productive. 12 tabs open and a podcast going in one ear, and you feel like a machine. Then the day ends and the one thing that mattered is still sitting there untouched. Attention is stolen, not lost, and the sneakiest thief is the one that convinces you the theft is efficiency.

I’m not great at this. I’ve got a browser open right now with more tabs than I’ll admit to in writing. But single-tasking is the closest thing to a superpower I’ve found, precisely because so few people will slow down enough to do it.

So what’s the one thing today that deserves your whole brain instead of the leftover slices?

Tomorrow, a way to settle the system when it won’t settle.

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