The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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 in a ­pocket—even if it is turned off—has been shown to impair performance on cognitive tests, particularly among people who are more phone dependent.

The year before I encountered Mark’s research, I had to get a few stitches in my head. It was no big deal, just uncomfortable. I was told to move slowly for a few days, ice regularly, refrain from jerking my head, and sleep sitting upright. All of that was annoying. Yet after three days, I was surprised by how happy I felt. I started tracking what I was doing in a journal to see if I could figure out what was going on.

My conclusion: It wasn’t so much what I was doing as what I wasn’t doing. Whether I was reading, working on my computer, or brushing my teeth, I was “monotasking,” concentrating on one thing at a time. Not being able to move quickly or turn my head had the effect of forcing me to focus. I remembered that I really like my work when I can do it in a focused manner and at a steady pace. I think the discomfort even helped: If I started to multitask, I could feel pain and tingling near the stitches. It was like I suddenly had some sort of multitasking monitor implanted in my skin.

That feeling started to make conceptual sense when I read Mark’s work, which found that the faster people switch attention between devices, the higher their stress ­level. Laboratory experiments by other scientists have shown that multitasking leads to a jump in blood pressure, and intense multitasking causes changes in immune-system activity. While my wound was healing, I was more aware of physiological changes any time I tried to multitask, which led me to stop doing it.

As I was chronicling those days in a journal, I thought about the discomfort of two writers who, in my opinion, are among the best alive. Laura Hillenbrand wrote the nonfiction books Seabiscuit and Unbroken, and Susanna Clarke wrote the fantasy novel Piranesi. Both authors have experienced chronic-fatigue syndrome and discussed how it forced them to simplify their work routine.

I would not, in a bazillion years, wish chronic fatigue (or even a few stitches) on anyone. But I find it telling that unwelcome conditions can force limitations that lead to effective and sane work habits. In a frantically paced world, the literal and figurative space to think long thoughts requires curation and constraint.

Herbert Simon, a groundbreaking computer scientist, psychologist, and economist, once said that all his work was devoted to a single subject: how humans make decisions. Simon emphasized that we are always faced with imperfect information about our options and the potential consequences of our choices. Rather than “maximize,” or make the best choice from all available alternatives, he argued that people “satisfice”—consider a limited menu of options and choose one that is “good enough.”

Simon was, in his own words, an “incorrigible satisficer.” He didn’t agonize over keeping his options open. “He wore one brand of socks, thus, after the first purchase, never having to select the color or style of what he put on his feet each day,” his eldest daughter, Katherine, wrote. Simon “always had the same breakfast (bowl of oatmeal, half grape‑fruit, black coffee), and lived in the same house for ­46 years.” One might be tempted to accuse him of a lack of ambition, if he hadn’t won a Nobel Prize.

Simon believed that technology now delivers so much information that it exceeds our capacity to attend to it. “The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of ‘the more information the better,’” he said. How would we live and work if we prioritized the principle that attention is scarce? For one thing, we wouldn’t check email ­77 times a ­day—the average in one of Mark’s ­studies.

With Simon’s insight, Mark’s research, Allende’s example, and my own experience with the stitches all in mind, I set about tweaking my own work habits to impose constraints. Every change was simple. I resolved never to start the day with email, because for me email is an instant gateway to multitasking. And since I can never get through everything in my inbox, it leaves an attention residue that makes it difficult for me to switch wholeheartedly to my most important work.

When I make a list of tasks for the day, I put fewer items on it. I had been underestimating the cost of switching, so I was chronically overestimating what I could actually get done in a day. (This pervasive cognitive bias is known as the planning fallacy.) The result was that I would end up trying to multitask to keep up with my list, which meant that I both performed worse and took longer. I would then carry over unfinished tasks to the next day’s list, until it got so long that I gave up and threw it in the trash. Then the cycle would begin again. Now I start my daily list with a single task that, if accomplished, will mean it was a good day.

In an effort to curtail interruptions, I started using focus mode on my phone to avoid constant notifications. Then I turned my phone off while I was working and left it in another room. It didn’t immediately make a difference, but pretty soon the internal metronome that prompted me to check various feeds and inboxes slowed to a crawl. I cut down looking at my phone to once or twice a day, and on days when focused work was the priority, only at the end of the day. When I interrupted myself with thoughts about other things I had to get done, I would immediately write them down in a notebook. That cognitive outsourcing prevented unfinished tasks from lingering in my mind.

Not everyone can turn off their phone and leave it in another room. But whatever your job, many of the highest-cost attention switches have nothing to do with the actual demands of work—they’re just a matter of habit. Nurses can’t ignore a page, but they can stop checking email between patients. Teachers can’t shut the door on students, but they can do administrative work in a single batch instead of scattering it through the day. Even modest reductions in switching pay off disproportionately in improving productivity and reducing stress.

Finally, I took Mark’s advice to work in intervals. Attention is like a bucket, she told me; you want to take a break from intense focus before the bucket is filled and you’re exhausted. Angelou would periodically take a break from writing to do crossword puzzles. She framed it as toggling between her “big mind,” which she used for writing, and her “little mind,” which she could use for something simple.

Taking a break to use your little mind for rote activity replenishes your big mind. The neurobiology behind this is only beginning to be understood. In 2022, scientists showed that hours of concentration leads to a buildup of the chemical messenger glutamate in the brain. Too much glutamate is poison to brain cells, so it could be that part of mental fatigue is your brain reducing its activity to prevent getting to that point. Whatever the reason, little-mind breaks help you recover focus before reaching exhaustion. Plus, they’re fun.

When Allende felt tired or stuck in her writing, she turned to beading. If you check social media for a focus breather, Mark suggests setting a time limit so you won’t get sucked into scrolling, or doing it before a meeting so you’ll be forced to stop. When I’m working and my attention starts to wane, I try to find some natural stopping point and then use my little mind to recover, just like the jogging between sprints I used to do as a competitive runner.

The cost of not structuring our attention is higher stress, lower productivity, and impaired performance on the most important tasks. In a harrowing example, a study of nearly 1 million surgeries found that if a procedure was performed on the surgeon’s birthday, patients were more likely to die soon thereafter, apparently because the surgeon faced more distractions.

Everyone is familiar with one way to coax the best from our big mind: deadlines. Frank Lloyd Wright famously put off working on the design of Fallingwater for months, then drafted his masterpiece in a few hours when the client called to say he was about to visit. Duke Ellington liked to say: “I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline!” But a tight deadline can either enhance or destroy our thinking, according to research on time pressure. It depends on whether we respond by rushing to multitask or to monotask.

Deadlines are just another form of commitment device. The way Wright and Ellington worked, I think, was a version of what Allende does, except her January 8 deadline marks the start of her focus, not the end. When I read articles about Allende in preparation for visiting her, I was struck by how often they described her writing in mystical terms. Sometimes the journalists were just following her lead: Allende told me that there were two times in her career when a book just poured out of her as if dictated from beyond. That’s remarkable, and magical in its own way, but it’s also the exception. Her extraordinary productivity depended on carefully curated space, rhythm, and discipline. The real story of creation is not about boundlessness, but boundaries.

This article is adapted from David Epstein’s forthcoming book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.