I subscribe to The Atlantic. Today I read an excellent article titled “The Secret to Success Is 'Monotasking.'”
Posting the article here would violate copyright, so I have limited what follows accordingly. If you are not a subscriber to The Atlantic, I encourage you to consider one. It is among the better journals available. Apple News+ subscribers also have access to The Atlantic.
The piece opens by quoting a 2004 study, which found that the typical worker switched tasks about every three minutes. By 2012, every 75 seconds. By 2022, every 45 seconds. With that in mind, the following excerpts speak for themselves.
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.” … They also perform worse on important tasks…
Here’s the frightening part: We gravitate to a customary level of interruption. If you are disrupted by notifications all day, every day, then even if those external triggers magically disappear, you will unconsciously start interrupting yourself to maintain the rhythm of distraction you’re used to. That is why the mere presence of a smartphone on a desk or in a pocket, even if it is turned off, has been shown to impair performance on cognitive tests, particularly among people who are more phone dependent. …
Simon believed that technology now delivers so much information that it exceeds our capacity to attend to it. “The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of ‘the more information the better,’” he said. How would we live and work if we prioritized the principle that attention is scarce? For one thing, we wouldn’t check email 77 times a day, the average in one of Mark’s studies.
Epstein, D. (2026, May 1). The secret to success is ‘monotasking.’ The Atlantic. The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’ - The Atlantic