I’m a multitasking queen.
That’s not a brag—it’s a confession.
Like so many people holding households, caregiving, and big dreams together, I learned to split my attention into tiny pieces just to survive. The cost? A brain that feels scattered and further splintered by a household full of requests (because hey, I deluded them as much as I deluded myself that I could do it all), and a nervous system that feels this must be the only path because I feel as though I am always behind.
And here’s the kicker: multitasking isn’t just a bad habit. It’s an economy. Whole industries profit from keeping our attention fractured, selling us the idea hat we should be able to “do it all.”
So you can see why I keep circling back to the same practice.
Note the intentional word choice there: practice.
We can take change seriously, fall short sometimes, and return to the active engagement with change—meaning we are still heading in the same direction because we are practicing it!
The practice? What would happen if I just… did one thing at a time? And how do I increasingly make that practice a part of every nook and cranny of my life?
That’s where The Twelve Monotasks by Thatcher Wine comes in.
Wine identifies 12 areas where we can increasingly infiltrate our busy lives with the intentionality of slower living and monotasking: reading, walking, listening, sleeping, eating, getting places/traveling, learning, teaching, playing, seeing, creating, and thinking.
With any luck, you may be wondering how on earth someone could multitask some of these things, but unfortunately, in recent years more and more of us take another plunge into the “dark side.” That’s what makes these practices so empowering—finding and declaring spaces to “go counter-culture” and extract yourself from the attention and busyness economies!
So if you reading while flipping over periodically to check for a text? That’s multitasking reading. If you walk while listening to your favorite podcast? Multitasking. Go to dinner with friends but check your phones multiple times? Fall asleep with the TV on? Drive while talking on the phone and exceeding the speed limit? See a plant and suddenly feel like you want to own it, but first have to take a picture to find its official name, where to get it, it’s care directions, and three movie stars that also love that plant while reporting the search results to your friend who is with you? Also multitasking.
As you may be able to see, this is personal work for deeper, more steady-state living. It’s also world changing work. What if we could focus and apply ourselves to more of the world’s problems because we have the capacity? What if we recognized that corporations are hungry—they not only want our bodies in the daytime hours for machine-like work and efficiency, but they are also hungry for our minds and attention 24/7? If we were no longer participating, not only would our brains get a break, but a part of what puts the foot on the gas pedal of society (a part YOU are in control of) slows things TF down.
As you can see, this isn’t just personal work—it’s world-changing work. What if our focus and presence gave us the bandwidth to tackle bigger problems instead of leaking energy and attention into a thousand tiny distractions? What if we stopped feeding corporations that want our bodies for labor and our minds for consumption, 24/7/365? Imagine the collective power if we all showed up to the practice of NOT PARTICIPATING—the practice of monotasking. Not only could our brains finally breathe, but we’d slam the brakes on the busyness machine.
THAT is radical.