Reality Check: Your Brain Can't Handle Two Things at Once

Hi Reader,

💡 Today's Niblit: Gary Keller and Jay Papasan expose one of the most damaging productivity myths in The ONE Thing. What we call multitasking is actually task-switching — and it's killing your performance while making you feel busy and important.

🔑 Key Insight: Multitasking is a myth because your brain cannot focus on two cognitive tasks simultaneously. What feels like efficiency is actually rapid task-switching that burns mental energy, increases mistakes, and reduces the quality of everything you touch.

Imagine trying to watch three different movies at once by switching channels every 30 seconds. You'd catch fragments of each story but never understand any of them fully. That's exactly what happens to your brain when you bounce between emails, reports, and phone calls. Each switch creates a "cognitive switching cost" — time and energy lost in the transition.

Why does this matter? Every time you switch tasks, your brain needs time to refocus and remember where you left off. This switching penalty can reduce your productivity by up to 25%. Meanwhile, the person doing one thing with full attention produces higher quality work in less time, with less stress and mental fatigue.

🦉 Nibble of Wisdom: "Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time." (Chapter 9)

🛠️ Practical Tip: Practice "unitasking" — close all browser tabs except the one you need, silence notifications, and focus on completing one task before moving to the next.

🚀 Quick Action: For the next two hours, commit to working on only one task at a time. Notice how much deeper your focus becomes and how much more you accomplish compared to your usual scattered approach.

🔍 Further Exploration:

• Pay attention to how many times you naturally want to switch tasks during focused work—awareness is the first step to change.
• Consider which distractions (email, social media, messages) are your biggest multitasking triggers.
• Explore the Pomodoro Technique as a structured way to maintain single-task focus while building in natural breaks. (I use this technique to increase my writing output. I’m ghost-writing 3 books for clients as well as 3 daily newsletters. But I only work on one at a time for “lock down” writing sessions using a pomodoro timer app. Here’s a free one to try out.)

🎬 Wrapup: The most productive people aren't juggling more balls — they're catching one ball perfectly, then moving to the next. Ditch the multitasking myth and discover the power of doing one thing brilliantly.

🔗 Links:

• Check out The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan on Amazon
• ​The ONE Thing on Kindle​
• ​The ONE Thing Audiobook​
• ​Read The ONE Thing for FREE​

One task at a time,

Tom "reformed multitasker" Bernthal

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