Multitasking Is Killing Your Productivity - Thatcher Wine - #449

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Thatcher Wine. He's a professional book curator, founder of Juniper Books, and an author. Multitasking will make you less effective, less productive, less happy, and more prone to making errors in work and life. The question of why we're also tempted to do it then, and how we can stop seems an obvious next step. Expect to learn whether multitasking is just a modern phenomenon, how monotasking can result in more work being done at a higher quality, how technology has permanently changed the landscape for attention, the usefulness of walking between tasks, why tasks can get more difficult before they get easier again, and much more. This is yet another perennial human problem, trying to get too much stuff done, and I agree with the fundamental thesis that focusing on one thing going an inch wide and a mile deep on the thing which is right in front of you is not only more satisfying and fulfilling, but also more effective. So I'm sure that you don't need to be convinced of it theoretically, but there are some good practical solutions for how you can use monotasking more during your daily work and personal life today. But now, please welcome Thatcher Wine. Thatcher Wine, welcome to the show.

**Thatcher Wine** (1:39)
Thank you, Chris. It's good to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
How did you arrive at thinking about multitasking and monotasking? What's the journey that's taken you to? Think about that.

**Thatcher Wine** (1:49)
Yeah, so a lot of it came out of my own personal experience. I'm a citizen of the world that we live in, which is super distracting to begin with. Got all this technology, constantly asking for our attention, our smartphones, computers, other devices. And then on top of that, I threw in some personal challenges that were of the next level distraction variety. A few years ago, I went through cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, also an entrepreneur, got a business for about 20 years called Juniper Books, that is very creatively broad in what we do with books, and very demanding of a lot of my attention, and creativity, and productivity. I'm also a parent, I have two teenagers, and I wanted to figure out a way to navigate all the things I was going through, figure it out for myself, and when I figured it out, I thought I could share with the world what I learned about multitasking and monotasking.

**Chris Williamson** (2:46)
What was the genesis of that? Was there a point where you were juggling so many things with the family, with the work, with the health? Was there a particular period of time in which everything kind of got a bit much?

**Thatcher Wine** (3:00)
Yeah. I got to the point basically between 2016 and 2019 where I hit the wall. I just couldn't possibly have been more that I was dealing with at one time, and I was finding it really hard to switch back and forth between what I was going through for my health, for my business, for my family.
What I decided to do was kind of look back at how I had done it in the past. I'm a pretty productive person and I'm pretty creative, and I'm also very ambitious. A lot of things I want to do in life. So I kind of look back, how have I done this before? When have I not felt overwhelmed by it? One pattern that I recognized was that when I gave my full attention to one thing at a time, I got things done well. People said, the work is great. My kids said, we had fun. You get the feedback from the world that you're doing a good job and you don't feel so overwhelmed. But then, once I layered on all these other distractions that I was dealing with, it just felt like I always had to be staying up late, getting up early, depriving myself of rest, not exercising, and just taking on more and more and more. And I never felt like I was caught up. So, it was definitely in that three-year period where I was like, I gotta find a better way.

**Chris Williamson** (4:20)
Is there a tension between the amount of work that you can get done and the amount that you focus on single things and the quality of work? Is there a way that all of those are kind of interlinked?

**Thatcher Wine** (4:32)
Yeah, absolutely.
So, there's a bunch of research that's been done on multitasking. And the research basically shows that when we multitask, so when we take on more than one thing at a time, usually of the cognitive variety, so like you're doing an email and trying to listen in on a conversation, whether it's in Zoom or something else, we tend to make more mistakes and things take longer. Part of that is due to the fact that we just can't multitask. What we call multitasking is actually task switching. So we're going from one thing to another, we're making it look like we're doing it all at the same time. We like to look busy, right? That's sort of an American trade especially.