The Case for Doing One Thing at a Time

I tried, for a week in March, to do one thing at a time. The rules were simple and slightly silly: when I was writing, I would not check email. When I was eating, I would not scroll. When I was on a call, I would not have a second tab open onto something I wanted to do more. The week was, I will admit, harder than I expected, and also, almost embarrassingly, better.

The vocabulary around this has hardened into something faintly self-helpy — single-tasking, monotasking, deep work, the various flavors of attention management that get repackaged every eighteen months by someone with a Substack. I find most of it tiresome. But the underlying observation is hard to argue with: the modal knowledge worker, in 2026, is doing somewhere between two and four things at any given moment, and is doing all of them slightly worse than they would do any one of them alone.

The cost is not really about productivity. It is about how the days feel. A day spent doing four things at once is a day that, at the end of it, you cannot quite remember. The hours do not stack into anything. You were busy, you were on, you replied to a great many things, and you also, somehow, did not finish the thing you sat down to do.

What single-tasking offers, after the first uncomfortable hour, is the return of a sensation that knowledge work has largely lost: the sense of having been somewhere. You wrote for ninety minutes and the writing exists. You had a conversation and it was the conversation. The day acquires edges again.

There is no productivity hack here, and I would not trust anyone selling one. What there is, possibly, is a small daily practice — one block a day, an hour or two, with the tabs closed and the phone in another room — that gradually rewires what your attention feels like at rest.