What Is Monotasking? How to Do One Thing at a Time

You open a report to finish one paragraph. A message comes in, so you answer it. That reminds you of an email, and the email needs a file you haven’t found yet. Forty minutes later the paragraph is still half-written, and you’ve touched six things without finishing any of them.

Monotasking is the simple alternative: pick one task, give it your attention until it’s done or you decide to stop, then pick the next one.

What monotasking means

Monotasking, also called single-tasking, means working on one thing at a time. It isn’t about working longer or harder. The unit is attention, not hours.

It also doesn’t mean pretending everything else has gone away. The other tasks still exist. They wait their turn on a list, instead of competing for space in your head while you work.

Monotasking vs. multitasking

What most of us call multitasking is really fast switching: a few seconds on one thing, a few on another, back again. Each switch feels free. The research says otherwise.

• Switching eats time. The American Psychological Association notes that shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone’s productive time.
• Part of your attention stays behind. In a 2009 study, Sophie Leroy found that when people moved on from an unfinished task, their thoughts kept drifting back to it, and they did worse on the next task. She called this attention residue.
• Constant juggling doesn’t make you better at it. A Stanford study found that people who routinely juggled many streams of media were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and slower at switching tasks, than people who did it less.

Monotasking doesn’t make these costs disappear. It cuts down how often you pay them.

Why it can be harder with ADHD

Doing one thing at a time sounds obvious. With ADHD, the hard parts are usually around the task rather than the task itself: choosing it, starting it, and staying with it when something more interesting shows up. CHADD, the US national ADHD organization, explains that executive function difficulties affect a person’s ability to begin, work on and complete tasks.

A long list in front of you makes all three harder, because every item is a reason to stop and choose again. Monotasking isn’t a treatment for ADHD, and it won’t turn a hard day into an easy one. What it does is take away some of the choosing, so there’s less standing between you and starting.

How to start monotasking

Get everything out of your head first. Write down all the tasks you’re carrying, big and small. You’re not organizing them yet. You’re making sure nothing needs to be held in memory while you work.

Pick one task with a rule, not a debate. Take the one with a deadline today. If there isn’t one, take the one that would make the others easier. If you’ve been deciding for more than a minute, take whatever is at the top and start.

Make the first step small. “Write the report” is heavy. “Open the report and reread the last paragraph” is something you can do right now.

Hide the rest. Close the tabs you don’t need. Put your phone somewhere you can’t see it. If your list app shows everything at once, find a way to see only the current task.

Park new thoughts instead of acting on them. When you remember you need to call the dentist, write it down and go back. The thought is safe on the list, so you don’t have to act on it now.

Come back without scolding yourself. You will drift, especially at first. The skill isn’t never leaving. It’s noticing sooner and returning faster.

Stop on purpose. If you have to leave a task unfinished, write down the very next step before you go. It makes coming back much easier, and it gives the leftover thought somewhere to go.

Is monotasking the same as a Pomodoro timer?

Not quite. A timer decides how long you work. Monotasking decides what you work on. The two fit together well if you like working in sprints, but you can monotask without a clock. For some people, a countdown is just one more thing to watch.

How FocusDo helps you do one thing at a time

FocusDo is a to-do list built around this idea. Keep your whole list, then tap Focus and it shows one task at a time, in the middle of the screen with nothing else around it. Swipe across to cross it off, and the next one slides into place.

If you leave for another app mid-task, the task you were on follows you into the Dynamic Island and onto the Lock Screen, with a gentle nudge every few minutes to come back. There’s no timer to race and nothing to set up. Focus Mode and the nudges are free.