The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’ - The Atlantic

If Isabel Allende’s office needs to be painted, it has to be done by January 8 or put on hold. Every year, that’s the day she starts writing.<br>The pattern goes back to January 8, 1981, when Allende began her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Ever since, she has cleared her calendar and started a new book on that date, assuming she had finished the previous one. The ritual has helped her publish a book about every 18 months for 43 years. Today, at age 83, Allende ­is the most translated female ­Spanish‑language author in the world, by far.<br>“When I am writing a book, I need to close the door when I finish, and no one should get in,” she explained when I visited her home in Sausalito, California. “I have the idea in my mind that the story is an entity that lives in that room, with the characters and the emotions that I have been putting together. And when I come back the next day, I open the door and it’s waiting for me intact. I don’t want anybody to go in and vacuum, or to use my computer—that would kill me!” She paused for a moment. “Without the silence, and the structure, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.”<br>And these days, we’re struggling. Gloria Mark is a psychologist at UC Irvine who studies what, exactly, workers in a knowledge economy do all day. Early in her career, she shadowed office workers with a stopwatch and logged all of their activity. Mark and her co-author found that the typical worker switched tasks about every three minutes, on average. For the title of the resulting paper, in 2004, she used a quote from one of her subjects: “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness.”<br>Over the next 20 years, Mark studied work activity at large organizations such as Microsoft using increasingly sophisticated tools, including cameras and programs that recorded computer activity. In 2012, she found, office workers were switching tasks every ­75 seconds. By 2022, it was about every ­45 seconds.<br>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.”<br>They also perform worse on important tasks. Multitasking ER doctors make more errors in prescribing medications, and multitasking pilots make more errors in flying. The famed investor Charlie Munger had it right when he said: “I see these people doing three things at once, and I think, God what a terrible way that is to think.” Compare constant goal-switching with Allende’s approach to her workspace: “I go there, and there is a state of mind that is: I’m here to do this and nothing else and no one can interrupt.”<br>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...