The year before he encountered Gloria Mark’s research on multitasking, David Epstein’s explains (in Inside the Box), he had to get a few stitches in his 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 to sleep sitting upright. All of that was annoying. And yet, after three days I was surprised to find that I was so happy 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.
Not being able to move quickly, or turn my head, had the effect of forcing me to focus on doing one thing at a time, and at a reasonable pace. Despite the temporary discomfort, it was a joy.
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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 universally acclaimed nonfiction works Seabiscuit and Unbroken, and Susanna Clarke wrote the wondrous fantasy novel Piranesi. Both authors have suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, and both have discussed how that has, at times, forced them to simplify their work routines. When I mentioned this to Cal Newport, the computer scientist and author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, he told me that Hilary Mantel, another of the foremost writers of a generation (who had recently passed away), “dealt with chronic pain and fatigue, so had no choice but to work slowly and meticulously, creating masterpieces.”
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In a lecture in 1970, Simon said: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Simon explained that as information was becoming easier to gather and transfer, organizations were reflexively using technology to deliver more of it to individuals, even when it exceeded their capacity to attend to it. In theory-of-constraints terms, the information piles up at the bottleneck, which is you and your limited attention. “The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of ‘the more information the better,’ ” Simon said.
How would we live and work if we prioritized the design principle that attention is scarce? We probably would not check email seventy-seven times a day—the average in one of Mark’s studies—at least on days when focused work is the priority.
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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 all of it, it will leave attention residue that makes it difficult for me to switch wholeheartedly to my most important work.
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When I make a plan for tomorrow, I now simply put fewer tasks on it. I was underestimating switching costs, as we all do, 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 the list, which I now realize meant that I both performed worse and took longer. I would then carry over unfinished tasks to the next day’s list. This would proceed until the list became so ridiculous that I would flip it over to avoid the anxiety of seeing it, before eventually realizing it was hopeless and throwing it in the trash. Then the cycle would begin again. Now, at the top of each list is one single thing that, if accomplished, will mean it was a good day.
In an effort to curtail external interruptions, I started using focus mode on my phone to avoid constant notifications. Then I started just leaving my phone off and in another room to try to diminish my self-interruptions. It didn’t immediately make a difference, but pretty soon the internal metronome that prompted me constantly to check various feeds or inboxes slowed to an army crawl. As with email, I cut checking to once or twice a day, and on days when focused work was the priority, only at the end of the day.
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When self-interruptions still inevitably arose—usually related to some reply I’d forgotten to send—I would immediately write them down in a notebook. That cognitive outsourcing prevented unfinished tasks from lingering in my mind.
Finally, I took Mark’s advice to work in intervals. Attention is like a bucket, she told me, and you want to take a break from intense focus before the bucket is filled and you’re exhausted.
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In 2022, scientists showed that hours of concentration leads to a buildup in the brain of the chemical messenger glutamate; too much glutamate is poison to brain cells, so it could be that part of mental fatigue is your brain reducing activity long before that point. Whatever the case, little mind breaks help you recover focus before reaching exhaustion.