{"id":144345,"date":"2023-05-01T08:12:14","date_gmt":"2023-05-01T13:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/?p=144345"},"modified":"2026-09-07T15:15:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T20:15:56","slug":"monotasking-podcast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/character\/self-improvement\/monotasking-podcast\/","title":{"rendered":"Podcast #768: Become a Focused Monotasker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Note: This is a rebroadcast of a favorite episode from the archives.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Writing an email while on a Zoom call. Talking on the phone while walking. Scrolling through social media while watching a movie.<\/p>\n<p>In both our work and our play, we&#8217;re all doing more and more multitasking. Doing two things at once makes us feel as if we&#8217;re more efficient and getting more done.<\/p>\n<p>But my guest would say that all this task juggling actually makes us <em>less<\/em> productive, while diminishing the quality of our work and stressing our minds, and that we&#8217;d be better off curbing our multitasking in favor of <em>mono<\/em>tasking. His name is Thatcher Wine, and he&#8217;s the author of <em>The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better<\/em>. Today on the show, Thatcher explains the illusions around multitasking and the benefits of monotasking \u2014 that is, bringing our full focus to a single task at a time. We discuss why reading is a foundational part of becoming a monotasker, and then get into some of the other activities Thatcher recommends monotasking, including walking, listening, traveling\/commuting, and thinking. Thatcher argues that doing things like listening to a podcast while cleaning your house isn&#8217;t necessarily a bad thing, but that you may want to try stripping everything away from your daily tasks except the primary tasks themselves to observe the resulting effect and to strengthen your &#8220;monotasking muscles&#8221; and rebuild your attention span. Once you&#8217;ve experimented with doing a task alone, you can then decide to layer back in the second activity, or, maybe decide you actually liked giving it your all.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note: This is a rebroadcast of a favorite episode from the archives. Writing an email while on a Zoom call. Talking on the phone while walking. Scrolling through social media while watching a movie. In both our work and our play, we&#8217;re all doing more and more multitasking. Doing two things at once makes us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":194814,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[502,156,42388],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-character","category-podcast","category-self-improvement"],"featured_image_urls":{"large":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/768-538x280.png","medium_large":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/768-768x432.png","aom":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/768-372x230.png","reactor-320":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/768-320x180.png","reactor-640":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/768-640x360.png"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Podcast #768: Become a Focused Monotasker | The Art of Manliness<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/character\/self-improvement\/monotasking-podcast\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Podcast #768: Become a Focused Monotasker | The Art of Manliness\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Note: This is a rebroadcast of a favorite episode from the archives. Writing an email while on a Zoom call. Talking on the phone while walking. Scrolling through social media while watching a movie. In both our work and our play, we&#8217;re all doing more and more multitasking. 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