Why You Might Want to Try 'Single Tasking'
Tip #3: The silence is where the magic happens. All we have to do is stop filling it.
What I’ve learned is that the best way to effect change in your life and in the world is not to engage in grand gestures, but instead to focus on making many micro-changes that one day add up to big change.
In this series—How to Change1— I’ll share the incremental changes I made that resulted in a lot of big changes in how I exist in the world and even where I physically live.
Last year, I made perhaps the biggest change a person can make in their life: I moved to another country on another continent where I don't speak the language.
It's funny that I didn't appreciate it as a massive change when I left because it felt like the natural thing to do. It was something I had wanted for such a long time, and by the time the opportunity presented itself, it felt like the next obvious step.
But looking back, I can see that I couldn’t have taken such a leap of faith—especially because my husband is tied to Washington DC for his job for a few more years—without the foundation built by the small, seemingly mundane changes I'd been making in my life over the previous five years.
One of those changes that paid huge dividends was giving up the need to stay busy every minute of the day—ideally with ten balls in the air—like some deranged circus act.
Specifically, I gave up multitasking and traded it in for something called single-tasking.
Single-tasking is exactly what it sounds like: you do only one thing at a time.
This means no toggling between email, social media, Substack, and your work project. If you are chopping vegetables, that's all you are doing. You aren't on the phone or watching a TV show, or listening to a podcast. You don’t respond to notifications on your phone because all your notifications get turned off when you live this way.
When you go for a walk or a drive by yourself, you do this in silence.2
I know—it sounds kind of hellish, right?
Except it isn't.
Once you get past the withdrawal symptoms, it starts to feel normal, like this is actually how we are supposed to live.