The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking
- sciart0
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "Multitasking is the act of distracting yourself.
It comes with a cost even when tasks feel related, because it requires you to switch the “mental rules of the game,” as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham puts it. Even when people are allowed to switch between tasks at their own discretion, the more they switch, the longer everything takes.
As Mark has written: “We find that in real‑world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end‑of‑day assessed productivity.” ...
... Allende’s January 8 ritual is a form of what social scientists call a “commitment device”: a self‑imposed restriction of freedom in service of a larger goal. Commitment devices have been shown to help people save more money, by having a bank account with limited withdrawal windows, and exercise more, by signing a contract to pay a fine if they skip too many days at the gym.
Allende’s reward for her rigid schedule is unadulterated focus. As the computer scientist Cal Newport has noted, writers were the original remote workers, and anyone who studies the great ones will notice that they tend to go out of their way to designate a specific space and time for their work. Maya Angelou famously rented hotel rooms and stripped the artwork from the walls so as not to be distracted. Victor Hugo locked up his clothes while writing so he wouldn’t be tempted to change and go outside. Marcel Proust lined the bedroom where he worked with cork to dampen outside sound.
The reason such practices are important is that sustained focus is highly unnatural for human beings. Our brains evolved to be extremely distractible, to attend to any novel sights and sounds in our vicinity. Unsurprisingly, research has found that people instantly become more creative when distractions are removed. The science writer Annie Murphy Paul explains in her book, The Extended Mind: “It was only when we found ourselves compelled to concentrate in a sustained way on abstract concepts that we needed to sequester ourselves in order to think. To attend for hours at a time to words, numbers, and other symbolic content is a tall order for our brains.”'