Modern Wisdom - #449 - Thatcher Wine - Multitasking Is Killing Your Productivity

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

Thatcher Wine is professional book curator, founder of Juniper Books and an author. Multi-tasking 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 all so tempted to do it and how we can stop seems an obvious next step. Expect to learn whether multi-tasking 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... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Learn how to skip college and get Praxis’ free book on the success mindset at https://discoverpraxis.com/modernwisdom/ (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on everything from Lucy at https://uk.lucy.co/ (UK) or https://lucy.co/ (US) (use code: MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The 12 Monotasks - https://amzn.to/3vXOZ8Z Follow Thatcher on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thatcherwine  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 high 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 in 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 monet asking more during your daily work and personal life today. But now please welcome That's your wine, welcome to the show. Thank you Chris, it's good to be here. How did you arrive at thinking about multitasking and monotasking? What's

the journey that's taken you to think about that? 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 kind of threw in some personal challenges that were of the next level distraction variety. A few years ago, I went through cancer at Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, also an entrepreneur that had a business for about 20 years called Juniper Books that was very, you know, 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 of two teenagers. 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 out, I thought I could share with the world what I learned about multitasking and non-otasking. 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 sort of period of time in which everything kind of got a bit much?

Yeah, I got to the point basically between 2016 and 2019 where I hit the wall. I just, there was, 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. And, you know, what I decided to do was kind of look back at how I'd done it in the past. So I'm a pretty productive person. And I'm pretty creative and I'm also very ambitious. A lot of things I wanna do in life.

So I kind of look back, how have I done this before? When have I not felt overwhelmed by it? And 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, you know, the work is great. And my kid said, you know, we had fun, like you get the feedback from the world that you're doing a good job. And you don't feel so overwhelmed. But then, you know, 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's definitely in that three-year period, you know, where I was like, I gotta find a better way. 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. 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. 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. What people mean by what they think they mean

by multitasking is parallel processing. Yeah, parallel processing, or it could be serial processing. And you do one thing, then you do the next thing, then you switch back to the other thing, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The parallel processing might be more like background tasking and primary tasking, where somebody might be listening to this podcast while folding their laundry. Right? Most people can do that. But can I have this conversation and also be working on a presentation or a response to a client?

No, I can't do it. And I could pretend to do it, but I'd actually be switching back and forth and basically cognitively overloading my brain and causing a lot of stress. Studies have been done that show it takes on average 23 minutes to switch from one kind of cognitive heavy task to another. Because I, like, if I tried to go from this conversation to my work, I'd be in a little time to figure out, like, where was I?

What's this all about? What are my goals, like, reviewing it for mistakes and all that? So we don't often give ourselves that break, that 23 minutes, and it causes us to get overwhelmed and stressed out and burnt out, to be honest. What's the root of multitasking? Is this a perennial human problem? The philosophies of ancient Athens struggling with this as well? Yeah, I mean, for sure.

It's definitely been around for thousands of years. Part of it is the, and that's an understatement, but it's part of it's the design of the human brain. Like we're supposed to take in what's happening in our environment. You wear the dangers. It's a wild animal off the distance. Like I got to height my awareness and take care of my family. That's an ancient form of multitasking, right?

Another one is like sitting here, but my mind is wandering. So can I bring it back to the present moment through prayer and meditation? Those practices have been around for a very long time. Modern multitasking, I think, dates to the 1960s when computers were introduced. And we started to think about how they could multitask processes, switching from one application to another. So the 1980s with Windows, everybody visualized it at their desktop computer. Oh, I can go from Excel to Word.

You know, my computer can run both applications at the same time. Well, humans designed those computer programs. Why can't we do the same thing? Why can't we teach ourselves to multitask? And then a lot of like employers started, you know, I'm kind of asking, can you multitask? Like we'd love to have you on the team. And we're going to throw all this stuff at you.

And then it became kind of glorified. And a lot of people brag about their ability to multitask. But it's not actually good for us. And it's not something we're particularly good at. Why is it not good for us? I understand why it's not something that we're good at. Yeah. So it causes like a physical and mental strain on our bodies that we're just not designed for.

So I mentioned the 23 minutes statistic a few minutes ago. So when we don't give ourself the time to switch from one thing to another, we get stressed out. We feel overwhelmed. We can't quite put our finger on it. But we, you know, there's a real bottleneck in our cognitive ability. So like, you'll have people these days, I hear a lot, like, I don't enjoy my hobbies anymore. I used to enjoy reading, I used to enjoy biking.

But, you know, the fact that we always bring our phones with us everywhere, and a lot of people do something, like make a call, scroll through social media. It creates a multitasking bottleneck in our brains. So we can't like have that feeling that we used to have of being in the present moment, enjoying what we used to enjoy right now, right here, and with the people we're with. Yeah, it really does feel like we're not immersed in experiences as much. I kind of critique myself all day about this. I'm in a taxi journey. Good example.

I was in a taxi journey to go for dinner last night. And I'm sighting a taxi and I'm driving through South Congress. South Austin's really nice. Got downtown coming towards me. I can see the capital building sort of through the dark front windscreen next to the Uber driver. And I was thinking, this is really, really nice.

And I'm just watching. But I had to consciously think about not picking up my phone to check if, oh, maybe there's an email that I can get to right now, which is gonna make tomorrow a little bit easier because I want to have that email to do. But even that, even though I decided not to task switch, the ambient sort of parallel processing

world or multiple multitasking world, even the thought of that took me out of the present moment and being immersed in it as well. So, you know, there's like, there's gradations of how distracted you can be when you're doing stuff. But I really, really value that memory, you know, thinking back about last night and seeing the Capitol building coming in and it's cool and there aren't so many skyscrapers in Newcastle where I'm from, so it's a different sort of view for me to see. Now, I really value that. But it's so easy to avoid it. Have you thought, I'm going to guess that you must have realized that boredom plays a pretty big role here that

a lot of the time what people are doing with multitasking is probably sedating themselves from the boredom of one thing with another thing. 100%. Yeah. So, you know, what was going on in that car ride, you know, is that we've trained ourselves where we've been trained by technology and our devices and despite the fast-paced modern world we live in, that we never have to be bored. As soon as anybody gets bored these days, our tendency is to reach for our phone. As soon as we

feel like, oh, I've got whatever I'm doing right now, down, I'm going to layer something else on. So it's just a habit and we have to go easy on ourselves. It's not our fault that we're reaching for our phone. There's billions of dollars and lots of people on the other side of that convincing us that that's what we should do. The book, the 12 Monotasts that I wrote, there's a chapter in there called Getting There. It's all about how to pay attention to the journey, whether that's your commute or you're in a new city or you're going on a trip and seeing something new, and just sit with the fact that look out the window. Pay attention to the things you've

never seen before or something, if you've taken this ride a thousand times, maybe you will notice something new, or maybe you'll just like monotask your boredom and be okay with that and then not reach for your phone so quickly in the future. There's also like this big impulse to be like oh that's really cool I have to take a picture and it's like no you were there you it's okay you know the experience was great you remember it you had that feeling and just the like the act of even thinking about taking a picture and layering on something else. It can really take us out of that moment and that feeling of happiness and joy of being

where we are. What technology's done and not to lay all of the problems of multitasking at the feet of technology, right? This is, as it seems, a perennial desire for humans to constantly rid themselves of boredom by any means necessary. But it's driven the price of removing boredom essentially down to zero. It's made it frictionless for us to be able to get rid of that at any time. So at the slightest sign of discomfort, what we do is we then escape that.

We're waiting in line somewhere, we're on a journey somewhere. And for the people, pretty much everyone has some form of productive work that they can do on their phone, even if that's just answering personal emails or swiping stuff as unread. So you can always, there's a kernel of truth in it, right? Well, this is productive. This is me being useful, and this journey is going to happen anyway. You know, I'm going to to town. I might as well use it for something useful. What is it about monetasking that makes it so hard then? Because when you think about it, it sounds like it would take more effort to do two things at once instead of one. And usually the human systems pretty good

at finding ways to be lazy. So it's kind of counter-intuitive that monetizing is difficult. That's a great observation. And I talk about that a little bit in the book. Like if it were easy and obvious, it would be a very short book. And I wouldn't have that much to say. But it's actually, it is really hard. And anybody that's tried to do one thing in time instead of multitasking, you know that. So I think it's also think it's really simple. That's what the greatest compliment I get. It's like, this is so simple yet powerful. Like, it should be simple.

We should just be able to decide like, hey, I'm doing five things at once. I'm gonna pick one, I'm gonna do it with my full attention and I'm gonna move on to number two. The reality is that like multitasking has become very pleasurable in some respects. Like you think about media multitasking, like you sit on the couch with your phone, your texting, you're watching Netflix, you've got your computer on, you know, maybe occasionally popping in and check it in email.

I think everybody can relate to that. You just relax and like you don't, you think everybody can relate to that. You just relax and you're not really getting much done. You're not paying full attention to anything. So I think that's where it becomes hard. Paying full attention instead of paying partial attention. Paying partial attention is easy. It just doesn't really result in your best work or your most efficiency or really being present with the people you care about that you're hanging out with. So I think it's pleasurable, I think it's habitual, you know, so like everything in the

world is just glorified in multitasking culture. Made you think you can do it and you're going to be celebrated if you do it and here are some, you know, celebrities and famous people that do it on, you know, run their fashion empire in between, you know, playing tennis matches or whatever. So it's hard and I think we once you do the work and you get more accustomed to the feeling of what it feels like to do one thing at a time, you recognize like, hey, this isn't something I've felt in a while, then that becomes more rewarding than the multitasking. Then you start to recognize like what you recognized in the car. Like, hey, I'm not paying full attention here and I'm not enjoying this really cool view. Like what if I could do that, and then you do it, and then you like start to make more of those moments in your life, more you do it the better it become.

I think that very much the best work that we do is when we're focused on a single thing. And beyond the fact that we can't really multitask and it's making our work take longer and it's not as psychologically fulfilling, I think the main difference that I've noticed with my friends that are able to go sort of hard and deep with one particular task is the level of output in terms of the quality of the work, the level of creativity or ingenuity or just they are able to get to a higher level by focusing on one thing. And the most important thing when you think about what you're competing with everybody else on, you're not, you're very rarely in a job, are you competing on the volume of work that you can put out.

Like the best pitch that wins a new client over is not the pitch with the most words, or the pitch that's been sent the most times or the company that puts the most ideas across. It's usually the company that has the single best idea. The person that gets the job isn't the person with the longest CV, it's the person with the best CV with the highest caliber of work. And increasingly you see this in the world of podcasting on YouTube, right? The best YouTubers and podcasters on the planet, they're not the people that put out the most videos. Now there might be some correlation between consistency of content and how popular

they are in the market, but it's not about that. It's about the fact that when you sit down and listen to whoever your favorite podcaster is, you know that that's going to be a really, really high quality podcast. So you don't care about the fact that someone could live stream their life 24 hours a day. But if it's not good, it doesn't matter.

And it's going to be beaten by the guy that does one amazing hour of work per week because he's fully focused on it. So I think that there needs to be an understanding, sort of a cultural change, so that people realize that you genuinely aren't competing with other people based on the volume of work that you put out. You're competing with it based on the quality of the work that you put out, you're competing with it based on the quality of the work that you put out. Yeah, I think there's a lot of fear that, you know, if I'm not creating this huge volume of work and making it and telling people about all the things I'm doing and all the side hustles I have and all, you know, the accomplishments like that I'm somehow failing. But you're absolutely right.

It's about quality, not quantity. Almost all success in life. And that comes from, you know, I referenced in the book, Cal Newport and Deep Work. Like, you have to like focus, do your, when you get into the space of like, Deep Work, and you learn how you do your best Deep Work. Like, then you can do it. You can do it more often, and you can be more successful. And you can take on a lot of things in life. Like, so I have a business, a parent, written a couple books, like, it's a lot of output.

The only way I can do it is by doing one thing at a time. I can't write a new book while I'm, you know, talking to a customer on the phone. But I can do both in life. And I don't think the people should, you know, scale back their expectations of what they do. I think they should just do them one at a time. And I think there's a lot of fear, you know, at the beginning when people are

so used to multitasking, it's like, I can't, I can't slow down. You know, then it won't be as productive. And what if I slow down and then like, I can't get down. Then it won't be as productive. And what if I slow down and then I can't get back up to speed if I want to? So there's like any making any habitual change like that. It takes some courage to take the first step, give it a try and then realize, oh, I'm actually going to get more done.

I'm going to do better quality work. I'm going to be more connected. And I'm going to be better at everything in life. I'm going to be a better listener. And that's not just going to help me get the customer, but have a better relationship with a partner. How did Kansa change you of you on this stuff? Yeah, I mean, Kansa changed everything in my life. I mean, I was a healthy person beforehand, very active and then discovered

I had three tumors in my chest and I had to go through pretty intensive chemo, about 100 hours a week, time six rounds. So it was pretty grueling, and what I didn't know is that that was just going to be the beginning. When I went through chemo, everybody was like, oh, chemo is so hard, you can be sick, you can be weak, you can lose weight, you're not going to want to eat. Nobody really told me how long it was going to take to recover from it and get my energy back. But it took like close to four years.

And part of that was because I pushed myself too hard while I was going through achievement to keep up with work, try to, you know, ride my bike afterwards. I like try to keep up appearances. You know, I was like, the really hard work in creative, optimistic guy, and I was like, I feel like crap. And I didn't want people to know that. And I was like, I just get a good night's sleep. If I just take a day off, if I just get this work done, maybe I'll feel better. And nothing worked.

And it really just took a lot of time, a lot of like micro adjustments. And so I think it gave me this perspective that like, you know, what if I never get back to my full strength? What if I have to slow down? What if I can't pretend like, what if I can't fake it till I make it? And so I made a lot of adjustments like like in my mindset, in my diet, in my daily routine, and where I gave my attention, because that was the one thing, even though my body didn't feel good, and even though I was exhausted, I could give my attention to things and choose where to apply that. And knowing that it was kind of precious and limited, I decided to really become a keen observer about my attention, my focus, distractions in the world, and try to manage them a little bit better in order to get more done.

try to manage them a little bit better in order to get more done. It's wild that 600 hours of chemotherapy still wasn't enough to slow down your desired multi-task in the first place. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I, yeah, that's a good observation. Everybody said, like, slow down, you know, take care of yourself, you'll have time to do, you know, take care of yourself, you know, you'll have time to do, you know, whatever you're trying to do on your laptop at the, you know, the infusion center later. Um, but now I didn't listen because I think I thought, like, I did a lot of work observing myself like on the side effects and kind of making those micro adjustments I talked about, like, you know, take aloe vera juice for, you know, my stomach, soreness, and whatever.

Like, I had a million tips and tricks that I'd figured out and learn from other cancer patients and practitioners. But I still didn't want to slow down. Yeah. I mean, that's, and then I could like, I, you know, relate to other people in this world, whether they're going through cancer or something else, they're just trying to get their start up off the ground while working a full-time job.

Like, it's life. Everybody's going through something and there's a lesson to be learned in all of it. And I think we just always have to learn from it and make some adjustments to optimize and our happiness and our stress levels and our performance. One of the things I've been thinking about recently is a hourglass shaped or a bottleneck shape that a lot of journeys and sort of passion projects that then perhaps become businesses

or relationships that then get a little bit more serious that they tend to follow. So this is complete bro science. So just bear with me. At the beginning when you do something, it's usually new, the novelty motivates you. It's casual, so there isn't that much pressure. Let's run this for both relationship and passion project that becomes business.

All of these things are true for both of those. There's little pressure, there's no sunk cost fallacy, there's no investment, you don't feel like it's part of your identity, people don't really care that much about you doing it. It's just a thing that you're doing for fun. Over time, the level of pressure and scrutiny that you and other people place on you, the amount of investment that you have, the amount of work that you need to do, the amount of tasks and different areas that you need to try and bring together in an effective manner, those start to ramp up, but you haven't got to this stage yet where you've done it for so long that you can either

delegate control to somebody else or kind of operationalize some of the common challenges that you face so that you become easier at, it becomes easier to you. So you go from the wide neck, right? It's easy, casual, less pressure to the narrowing in the middle section, which is when you've got more pressure, more workload, more tasks to try and do, great a sense of obligation to the people around you and to the people that you work with. But then I do think that out the other side of that, you can actually get yourself to a place, especially in a business where maybe you've recruited an assistant and maybe there's a manager now and maybe you've operationalized stuff and maybe you've got a social media team into coming to look after

stuff and maybe you've got somebody and it's going to do finance and someone's going to do marketing and you don't have to do your own schedule anymore. And it actually, it does follow a very odd sort of curve shape. It goes from easy to difficult to easy again. However, what you realize is that the strategy that got you from easy to difficult was putting your nose against the grindstone. It was going, right, I'm going to go as hard as possible. I'm going to do everything. I'm going to be across everything. And every business person that's listening knows how difficult it is to let go of control

to delegate and to relinquish the tasks that you usually do to new people because you know that they're going to get it wrong at least a little bit more than you do right now. And letting go is it makes you terrified so a lot of the time you don't ever allow yourself to get out the other side of that hourglass bottleneck. To find the easy stuff that's on the other side of in a relationship as well you know you're going to have most disagreements in relationships are going to center around probably five things. It's going to be consistent thing that happens. You choosing to do one thing instead of another. You choosing to not do this thing instead of that. Those are the disagreements that are fundamentally going to happen.

So operationalize those as well. But if you don't allow yourself to be able to come up with the solutions to delegate control in a business or to try and break down those challenges in relationships. You just stay in that middle section. So yeah, that's my cod psychology solution for you. Yeah, no, I love it and I can totally relate to that. So I've had my business June for Books for 21 years now.

And not to disappoint any entrepreneurs, people starting up companies, like it never really gets, it gets easier, and then it gets harder. I mean, I don't know if it's one hour glass shape or it's like, multiple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm going through a lot of that right now. I'm, you know, especially as I'm trying to like work

more on promoting monotasking and sharing the message with the world, like I'm trying to delegate more and more. I have 20 employees. Every one of those people does something now that I used to do for myself. So I've got like 20X, you know, my capability or whatever, which is awesome. That's where you want to get to. But then like, you know, I got to get another like 5% off my plate. Got to find the right person. Got to train them. But once I get them up to speed, then I'm gonna help manage them to build their team. So yeah, so not to disappoint anybody out there

that they're gonna be on the easy street at some point. But yeah, you have to work on it and you figure out a lot of things long the way. And I do think it's true, with relationships and our personal life and our hobbies, you know, it's like, yeah, you can learn how to do a new sport and then you can get better at it, you know, and then you have your setbacks and then you, you know, work on it again. And it's life. And I think we should go, we should be realistic

about the learning process and the ups and downs that we're gonna encounter. A lot of people like look at a lot of the stories you read in the press. You know, like, oh, so, so, you know, raised a billion dollars sold their company, whatever. Like whilst being an endurance racer and building a family and doing all of this or the show. Yeah, I mean, those are the stories that are great for the press to tell. It's not, you know, what for everyone of those, there's, you know, 10,000 other people. It's not, you know, what for everyone knows, there's, you know, 10,000 other people. And a lot of them, like, you'll never hear about and they figure it out and they're running their businesses day to day and they have a great life. And like, that's, I think, what most of us should aspire to.

Yeah. There's a quote that I saw the other day that says, you want everybody to know your name and nobody to know your face. And I think that that kind of just highlights the people that have that huge outlier success, like that outliers by definition, as opposed to the people that just iterate steady away on something that works. So given the fact that you have your book company plus your author, perhaps unsurprisingly, said that one of the most important monotasks was to read. So what's the advantage of reading, especially given the fact that a lot of people

that I know talk about reading, but what they mean is listening to books on audible. So their consumption of books is actually the same way as you would do a podcast because maybe they struggle to sit down and focus on a book for a long period of time. So I've thought a lot about reading because I've been in the book business for so long, and I've thought about how do we, what benefit does it provide us besides just entertainment or information? We can get information from an audiobook or a podcast. What I came to the conclusion about is that reading really helps us build our focus and then we can apply that focus to other parts of our life.

And when I looked around at successful people like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett, like they're big readers. Some of the busiest people in the world are some of the biggest readers. Like how do they have time for that? Why do they bother? Like, couldn't they just be going and like, starting more companies and making more money? And what I saw is that there's a correlation between,

you know, the habits of successful people, their ability to pay attention, and then their ability to be successful in life. And so I think what reading does for us, and I do think it's great, like, however you get your books and information, it's great. That's better than not reading. So, but I do think there's something special about the printed page.

When you bring your, when you hold a book in your hands and like takes up space and has like a weight to it, you're like, you're in one place. Your attention looking at the page is in one place too. And it goes down one page and then up to the next one. And people create these spatial maps in their minds of where they read something, where they were, they may not be aware of this. Where certain things happen in the book, you have that feeling like, how far into it at my, my, about halfway through, my near the end of shoot, like, I don't want the story to end. Like real readers can relate to that. And I think all that's good for

us. And I think it's a feature, not a flaw that we can't multitask while we're reading. It's one of the like the true monotask that I, you know, came up with this idea about monotasking for. It's like you can only read a book while you're reading a book on paper, audiobooks and kindles and stuff, like you can multitask. And I think that's a good thing. And I think if we read for a little bit every day, like it's strengthens our,

what I call it, monotasking muscles and our ability to pay attention. And then we can apply that to our work, to our relationships, to our hobbies. You know what it's like to read a paragraph and then to realize that you've been distracted and someone could hold a gun to your head and say, tell me what happened in that last paragraph you know, dude, I'm sorry.

And your eyes have tracked it all the way. And that's so fascinating, the way that our focus works, the way that we can be doing something kind of passively and yet our mind can be completely somewhere else. And then we kind of, you catch yourself having not been where you were, which is such a bizarre sense to say. I mean, that's multitasking, right? So yeah, you're pretending to read the book, your multitasking, you're thinking,

and you're in brain and somewhere else. So that's multitasking. There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, yeah, you're not, you have to go back and reread that paragraph. That's fine. That happens to everybody, even like the strongest, most focused people in the world.

But, you know, I think just having that awareness that like that's essentially what's happening, you know, with everything else we're doing in life. You know, like if I was having this conversation and thinking about lunch or something, it's the same thing. It's not terrible for us. I might not be as speaking as clearly as I struggle to find my words. I'm like, maybe I am thinking about lunch. But I think it's just having that awareness going easier on ourselves and then saying, what if I did give

my full attention to what I'm doing right now Either the book this conversation The walk that I might go on after this like it's different, you know And I think it's not only good for what we do in the moment But it like really strengthens our monotasking muscles that have atrophied Thanks to technology and a lot of other stuff and then we can we can apply them, you know, and then be more successful and have more fun. What would you advise to people who perhaps are the audiobook connoisseur that I've just mentioned, but are struggling to sit down? They sit down to read a book and they can barely even get through half a page before they

want to fidget and move around and then leave it. Yeah, I mean, I'd say, you know, start where you are and it's not one thing or the other. So I listen to audiobooks, but I also read a lot of books. I've started, so I think like any amount that you could spend reading on paper daily is good for you. Start with five minutes in the book. I talk about 20 minutes as being like an optimal amount

and start with something easy. reread a book you love and childhood. I don't care if it's Dr. Seuss. Like start with something on paper. I love to reread like, J.B. Salinger and Kurt Bologna. I've got a bunch of those books in my shelf behind me. Like they're pretty fast, you know, going easy reads.

Don't start with Wharton Peace, right? Like don't or a medical journal. Red Rising, I'm telling you, if you need a book to get into, get P.S. Brown, red rising is the one. Yeah, we make a like a specialish instead of red rising. No way. It's a huge book. Yeah, and it's, yeah, it's one of our most popular offerings.

It's great. He's, he's absolutely crushed it. So I put a, I'm going to go in a complete segue. I put a tweet out the other day saying I was struggling to find something as good as PS Brown's red rising or Patrick Rothfuss is the name of the wind And then whatever the way of kings or I think the second one was um and I got a a ton of interesting responses

But I think one of the things that you One of the things that I found that's interesting, there's two types of fiction books that I've been really enjoying recently. One of them are unbelievably fast-paced, so something like red rising is just like unrelenting, something happens and then everybody's dead and then everybody's not dead

and then there's a spaceship and then someone takes over a planet. But then if you look at Rothfuss and the way that he writes, it's so slow, it's genuinely pedestrian. You know, you get to know Kvoth, the guy who is the main protagonist in the books. You get to know his daily routine, you get to know his walk to work,

like his walk to when he goes to go and play his loot at the local pub that he plays in. You know the color of his room, you know the shape of his room, and it's so slow and pedestrian, but I really, really enjoyed that. And I wondered, it kind of makes me think about the multitasking versus the monotasking appearing

kind of within a narrative that you've got one book. And I felt, you know, I really, really enjoyed red rising, and Piers is gonna come on the show once he's finished the next one, which I'm excited about. But there was an extra level of... It was like taking a bath or something, just real luxuriating in the slowness of the narrative when you read the name of the wind. And it's so good. It's fantastic.

I mean, at any given time, I've got like five different books on my nightstand. And I just, like, depending on the mood I'm in, like some days you've had a really stressful day, and like, you can't take the like really deep, literary fiction, like, and you want that page turner, or you might just want like a biography and like read a paragraph before you fall asleep, you know? So I think people should don't feel like if you read one thing

and it doesn't work for you, that like, oh, I can't read. Like find the thing that works for you Read like a magazine, you know pick up in the airport and just you know that might be what you're feeling that day I think the other thing is a good tip that I share is if you love audiobooks and you love the particular book pick up the print copy like you'll have that familiarity with it It'll be in a relatively easy read. You'll still get something new out of it.

And it's a good place to start reading on paper. One of the things, I know that we're talking about print books here, but if you've got a Kindle, like a paper white or whatever, there's an extension for Google Chrome called Santa Kindle. And you press a button and the web page that you're looking at, let's say it's a blog post or whatever, it'll appear on your Kindle, fully optimized, highlightable in complete Kindle font where you can adjust everything in the margins and

all that stuff. And it just means that it turns your Kindle into an e-reader for the stuff that you see on the internet. So now as I'm going around and people send me articles or whatever during the day, or I've got a summary of that Joines, the 12 Monatask's book or something. I think I can press this one button, and then at some point when I decide to open it up, it's all going to be sat there in my library. So that, for me, is a much better way to read articles as well,

rather than reading it on medium on my phone or on sub-stack on my laptop or something like that. You receive a sub-stack from someone, press the title on the top, you go to the webpage, press the center kindle, there you go, there's Scott Alexander's new blog post, sat like a book and you know it's going to take you maybe 15 minutes, so that's your read the next morning, sometimes, if you're finding it difficult to get into books, perhaps articles, via eReader might be a good place to look at as well. Yeah, no, it's an interesting concept. And I think, you know, I wonder if that creates a mindset shift for you that you're not just like, mindlessly surfing the web.

And it's purposeful. Yeah, right. So it's like, you're reading, it's your information consumption, it's you're checking in on, you know, the authors whereas You know so much of the algorithm driven stuff that were fed, you know, it's just kind of mindless and it's so hard to stop Wait for the environment that you're in, right? You know, you're sat the guys a rob Henderson is able to read full journal articles My buddy rob is able to read full journal articles, my buddy Rob is able to read full journal articles on his phone. And dude, that is superhuman. Being able to do that, I can't believe that someone could read a very dry, extended piece of work

on the phone because for me that environment just isn't conducive to deep focus. And a laptop's only a little bit better than that. But again, what's the environment that you're in? You've got Kindle in hand. There's no swiping, there's no bings, there's no bongs. And then a paper book is one step further from that. Well, I mean, everything can be monotask. So like all those little tips and tricks, like, you know, instead of being in this like information overload, I'm

on a web browser, I've got these notifications coming in and just being like, I'm in a monotask this journal article or this, you know, whatever, medium piece or the story, like, you know, and give it your full focus. And, and, you know, people have been asking me, like, can you monotask social media? And, you know, I think you can. Like it's super distracting, but when I do it, I basically go in with a purpose. I'm creating something.

I'm either applying the creating monotask that's in my book and just thinking of it as a creative act that I'm putting up a post, or I think of it as playing. Like, I'm just having fun, you know. This is like, you know, a joke, it's a whimsy, whimsical thing I'm doing. Like, I I just wanna connect

with the world through my humor. And if I'm looking at other people's stuff, like I'm pretty much just like going to figure out what my friends are doing or what this person said, and then I'm getting out of there. And it's hard, I mean, everything is designed so that you don't do that, so you stay in an hour later, you're like, what am I doing?

Where the time go? But I think, you know, you can make that decision kind of like what you're talking about. It's like I'm gonna reframe it and I'm gonna you know use my time wisely to get what works for me Reframing the experience and what you tell yourself about it as well. You know if you do get distracted This is something that I struggle with if I spend you know an hour this is something that I struggle with. If I spend, you know, an hour accidentally falling down some YouTube rabbit hole. And before I know it, that's an hour of my day gone. And I think, are you idiot? You had so much stuff to do. And look, you've just spent the last hour learning about some crypto NFT scam that Jake Paul's going to get sued for or something

like knowing that you're never ever going to use. So I've been working a lot on trying to reframe the stories that I tell myself about my multitasking and monetasking. Did you come across information foraging and the theory of information foraging during your research? I mean, I don't think I'm specifically familiar with that term and I can imagine what it is. Yeah. So it was somehow it had a neuroscientist on that was talking about parallel processing

and multitasking. And he said that in the same way that squirrels and nut forages, humans are information forages. And for pretty much all of our history, the people that had the most information were the ones that had the biggest advantage. And then at some point within the last hundred years of our evolution, it switched from the person that has the most information to the person that's able to discern the information the best and actually stay focused on the most relevant information. So he uses

this example. There's a mathematical formula that you can use to look at how many nuts are left in a tree and how far away the next tree is to work out the likelihood of a squirrel leaving that tree to go to the next one because there's a cost that you need to pay to leave the tree and go to the next tree. But if the number of nuts that are in this tree started to diminish so much that the effort is worth changing. So he applied that to humans and information foraging and he said that one of the problems we have with social media and technology is that the friction from going from tree to tree has essentially dropped to zero.

And this is one of those things where a lot of the time you'll read, you'll see an article that looks interesting on Twitter. Click on it, read the title, read the subheading, click off it, go back to Twitter to find something else. Like you've just selected an article that you thought to yourself would be interesting to read. And you managed to get through the first paragraph.

And then really enough, like I'll jump to another treat. So yeah, I think being aware of that, being conscious and mindful of that compulsion to go somewhere else is pretty important. And also, what you were talking about earlier on, the fact that when you're having a conversation with somebody like this, not being distracted, not trying to think about other things, I think that the prescription for people to try and have a private podcast

with one of their friends for, you know, half an hour or an hour per week, talking about something in a rigorous, focused way without distractions, it's so therapeutic. And it makes you such a better conversation list because you have the skill to be able to care about what the other person says. And you talk about this as well, right? That listening is actually a skill that people can develop and that they can monitor us. Yeah, there's a whole chapter on listening in the book and one of my tips, I don't know if it's in the book or not, to be honest, but is listen as if you're recording a podcast? You know, listen like it's uncomfortable that you're paying

so much attention to the other person that's like, Hey, what's going on here? Like you normally are looking at your phone, what happened? You know, that's, that's what we should do. We don't have to do it in every single conversation, but we should have the skills to do it. Nothing in our adult lives and maybe nothing in our childhood either these days, like, cheats us as to how to do that and rewards us for doing that. I mean, yeah, you might have friends that are like,

I want to hang out with that guy. He listens. But, you know, but in your kind of sort of rewarded, like, because I think listening is important to sales and customer service. And the success of businesses, how well you listen to your customers and change your products and your marketing strategy. But nobody talks about it really as listening. So we don't really measure it. We don't really tell people to develop that skill necessarily.

It's super important, especially in relationships. As a parent, there's so much, there's some things that are said, a lot of things that aren't said, and if you're multitasking, you're not going to hear either. You might hear what's said. You're definitely not going to hear what's not said in between the lines, or the words or whatever, if you're just thinking looking at your phone or thinking about something else.

So I think it's super rewarding. I think we should do more of it. What about walking? So yeah, so there's a chapter I'm walking in the book and that kind of grew out of this idea that like, you know, we tend to combine our walks with other stuff. Whether it's like, I'm walking for exercise or I'm walking, I'm gonna make a phone call

or I'm gonna take pictures. Like, what if we just went for a walk? What if we just went for a walk? What if we just like, you know, opened our eyes, like looked out instead of down on our phones and you know, saw new things. I'm looking out the window here. It's like gorgeous Colorado setting, super bright. I look super pale.

That's a result. But I should probably get out and get some sunshine. But you know, see things you've never seen before. Here are sounds you've never heard before. Like if you're walking around a city, you and get some sunshine. But see things you've never seen before. Hear sounds you've never heard before. If you're walking around city, you might smell some things you've never smelled before. And that's OK. Hopefully it's a bakery or something.

But it makes us alive to absorb all this cool stuff in the world and be grateful for it, to be honest. And practice that ability, not to reach for our phone. And just be a little bit bored, maybe, I don't think walking is boring personally, but some people might think it is, and they might be like, I better go for a run. But I think just like slowing down

and join the walk is very therapeutic. Yeah, I, morning walk is the most important thing that I do as a part of my day. If I get that in, even if it's just five minutes, the rest of the day is usually noticeably better as opposed to the days when I've walkin' up too late or I've got too much to do and I can't fit it in. Even with that though, I find myself,

I've been tempted to do a diction, pronunciation exercises while I walk or I'm'm going to do, I'm going to spend the entire walk thinking of all different things that I'm grateful for. So set myself a challenge. And that is still I'm finding a way to, I've left my phone, don't take my phone out on a morning, I've still managed to find a way to multitask a walk, which is specifically there to be this lovely oasis of calm first thing in the morning. And then there's me doing sinful Caesar sipped his snifter, seized his knees and sneezed first thing in the morning. I'm walking around scaring all of the dogs and

cats. I mean, one, you know, I mentioned the 23 minute statistic earlier about like switching from one task to another and how long it takes to prepare to get into the next task. So one way I think about walk sometimes is like, if you're going to lose that 23 minutes, anyway, you're going to be sitting at your desk and be like, okay, what do I have to do? How do I get into the mind space for that? Maybe you should just go for a walk and use that as your reset time. 23 minutes, it's like, we're gonna lose it, get up, do something, clear your head.

And it's actually, I don't think it's that you should never multitask on the walks. You can use them purposefully like what you're doing because that, you can argue like, the thing that you're doing in the foreground is actually your exercise and the back and it's your walking. So I think it's good to combine, kind of like you're reading. It's like combine different types of walks. Have one where you're like doing nothing, but paying attention to like the ground underneath your feet.

Another one maybe you decide like, I'm gonna like think of a new idea for this project. And then other ones like you'll go out, you know, just planning to clear your head, and then you're like the most creative idea will pop into your mind. Because you decided to do nothing. And if you had decided to do something,

it wouldn't have showed up. And I think that's a really cool experience, especially for creative as an entrepreneur. That highlights the difference between walking and reading. With reading, it's always a front-brain task. You can't do something else whilst you read, whereas with walking, it's automated. Same thing goes for driving.

You've got a part in there about getting there, right? Commutes and journeys and trips and stuff. Most people that are competent drivers are able to do something else mentally whilst they're navigating traffic with their hands and feet. So that means that there are different ways, I think, to probably look at monetasking and multitasking. I would probably classify being on a Zoom call whilst writing an email as a different sort of multitask to

being in a car whilst thinking about something for work or being on a walk whilst listening to a podcast. If there's something that you can outsource to System 2, meanwhile System 1 is, sorry, to System 1, meanwhile System 2 is actually active doing something else, I think that's quite different. Yeah, and I think we, like, just having the self-awareness to think about those things as being different and not lumping them all together. Like, oh, I have to multitask all the time, otherwise I'll never get anything done.

Or I can't monotask or, or I can only monotask. Like, there are different subtleties within it, like you were just talking about. There's the background tasking and primary tasking. The driving, making a phone call, laundry podcast. And then there's like the cognitive heavy tasks. And if you can learn, you know, what you can and you can't do, then you can make better decisions about what stresses you're out, what makes you productive,

what makes you happy, what makes you connected. You can decide like, I better not even take my phone out while I'm out on the date, because I know that like, my brain's gonna look at it and I'm gonna be distracted and she's not gonna want to go out again. So I think it can be really helpful in all situations. What about learning and teaching? So yeah, so there's there's two chapters in the book

and to certain extent there are two sides of the same thing. But, I definitely believe in learning, continuous learning throughout our lives. I'd like to have a lot of hobbies and I'm trying to find more time to add additional ones, learn new instruments, take up new sports and all that. And I think having like a beginner's mind, if you're familiar with that, like a Buddhist term about like, I'm not a know-it-all about anything, even stuff I've been doing for 21 years, you know, there's always something to learn. And opening yourself up to the possibility

and then monotasking the learning, right? So saying like, I'm learning right now, like I'm learning how to, you know, talk about monotasking more better. I'm learning about, you know, how to manage my time, whatever. And then, you know, make those self observations that we've talked about throughout the manage my time, whatever. And then make those self-observations that we've talked about throughout the podcast.

And then apply the lessons. Don't feel like you have to do what everybody else does. Don't feel like you have to learn how they learn or do what they do. Find what works for you. And the other side of it is teaching. Like the teaching chapter, people shouldn't skip it because they're like, oh, I'm not a professional teacher. I don't stand in front of a classroom

and teach people. We're all teachers all the time. I might teach my kids something just by them seeing me do it, or a complete stranger might see how I like talk to the waiter in a restaurant. They'd be like, oh, that's, you know, that was very respectful and empathetic and kind and then learn from it. So, but on the other hand, like if you really, like somebody asked you, can you teach me how to play that song on guitar? You know, then I realized to think about, huh, like how do I do it? How do I teach it? And it like creates this whole like next level monotasking that brings your focus to what you know, how can you transmit it to somebody else? How are they receiving it as a learner?

Should I make some adjustments? And you can basically, you can develop mastery of things that you didn't know you were an expert in necessarily, but somebody else thought you could teach it. Or maybe your own career, you can take it to the next level just by thinking about how would I teach those other people? So that's pretty cool. What are the most common resistances that people encounter when they're trying to implement

monetizing more into their lives? You know, some people say it's a luxury, like it's privileged, like, I don't have time. I have bills to pay. I, you know, I have too much to do. You know, maybe when I'm retired, I'll be able to do that, you know. And I think that, you know, we get in our own way. I think there's a present moment, every moment, right here, right now, like with the people you're with doing the thing you're doing, wherever you are.

And if you recognize like, I could either do two or five things in this moment, or I could do one. And if you do one, like, it's in the present moment, you're not distracting yourself and deluding yourself and your capabilities. So I think, you know, you give it a try

and see if it works for you. So I think there's just like a little bit of that fear of people getting in their own way. That's one of the big ones. Losing memories and not being able to recall the things that you've done is one of the biggest advantages that I can see of this. I don't know how it works. I'd love to speak to a neuroscientist and find out why it is that when you try and have two things in your mind at once, you can barely remember either of them. It's not like you remember 50% of a trip

if you spent the entire trip obsessing about something for work. You just don't remember any of the trip and you probably can't remember what you were obsessing about to do with work either. And yeah, especially because I'm out here in Austin and I'm meeting new people and going to new places and stuff and I'm really, really conscious. Like I want to remember this. And it's cool. It's the first time that I've been in another country for an extended

period of time. I want to spend, I want to be able to look back and really enjoy the memories that I've created. And yet it's antithetical to the way that I spent most of the last 10 or 15 years of my life trying to run a business, trying to be on WhatsApp while taking calls while thinking about two or three or four other things all at the same time. So yeah, I think the quality of life change that you're going to have from monetizing would probably be worth it on its own. But then when you think about the increase in the quality of your output that you're going to have, the down regulation in terms of stress, all that stuff, yeah, man, I mean, it really is, I think, the perennial sort of modern person problem.

Yeah, modern, but yet an ancient problem, just a little bit more information. Weaponized with technology. Yeah, yeah. But I was at an event recently, and just having a side conversation with somebody and I introduced myself and I said, hi, my name is Batcher. And you got, oh, I want to remember that. And you got out notebook and you wrote down my name. And I was like, come up.

My name is like memorable, right? I'm just not like John or something. But I was like, that's a great hack, tip that he figured out for himself. Like, he brings himself into the present moment. This person's name is thatcher, I don't know if he made a note about what I looked like or something. It's monotasking.

Like, everybody else is like, oh, hey, yeah. And then you forget what their name is, maybe because you were thinking about something else, maybe you're just bad with names. It doesn't really matter. But like, if you can find what works for you, whether it's to record those memories or something else and just like fully pay attention, everything's better. I would say, I realize this as well

that I had an aversion to taking photos for a while. And one of the reasons for that was I'd confused taking photos for posting on social media. And it's the reasons for that was I'd confused taking photos for posting on social media. You know, it's super cringe. If you're out at dinner and somebody decides to try and take a million photos of the food, because you know that they're not taking the photo of the food, because they want to remember the food, they're doing it because they want to flex on whatever social network about whatever food they're eating or whatever restaurant it is. And that sort of made me feel a bit

Ick about recording the stuff that I did, but then you said, one of my good buddies, he's an absolute fiend with it. And I really, I very much appreciate and I'm envious of how many photos he has that capture the things that he's done. And I think that there's maybe a place, it's certainly something that I needed to stress test myself on, the fact that because I didn't like the idea of taking a photo for someone else, didn't mean that I shouldn't be taking a photo just for me. And the difference between your man that's written it down in a notepad and said, hey, that's you, why don't we take a photo together and just snap to a photo?

I do think that there's probably a way that you can be quite present and quite monetized whilst taking a photo. However, if it's performative and it's then being done for someone else, I think that that's where I draw the line. I think that's a great distinction. Yeah, I mean, I think if you're doing it for yourself because like this is how you're fully present, If you're doing it for yourself because like this is how you're fully present. If you're taking a picture of your food because you're like, you know, I'm going to enjoy it more, I'm going to taste the flavors. I'm going to write about, you know, I want to remember like where on the plate this was positioned before I ate it or something.

And then I'm going to tell the story a bit later. But I think they're like, if you're multi-tasking it, like, if you're not actually, if you're just thinking about what it looks like while you're doing anything, it's live concert or food or trip your own or something, like if you're always thinking like, oh, this would look so cool to people who aren't here. It's, yeah, it's one thing. And then if it's like, this will heighten my enjoyment of being in the present moment and my senses and my connection

to these people, then it's a different thing. And I think we can, you know, social media is not great about drawing that distinction or teaching us anything, really. But you know, we can, you can think about it in monotasking and multitasking terms, as a way to frame it. Am I doing two things, but it's still the same monotask of eating, of walking, of traveling? Or am I doing two things and they're really multitasking? Because I'm here, but I'm thinking about that social media post that I'm going to create

later. That's your wine, ladies and gentlemen. If you want to check out the book, it will be linked in the show notes below the 12 I'm going to create later. If you want to check out Red Rising and some of the other things we talked about. Awesome, I appreciate you. Cheers, man. Thanks, Chris. It's a pleasure.