Multitasking Is Killing Your Productivity - Thatcher Wine

Thatcher Wine is professional book curator, founder of Juniper Books and an author. Multi-tasking will make you less effective, less productive, less happy and more prone to making errors in work and life. The question of why we're all so tempted to do it and how we can stop seems an obvious next step. Expect to learn whether multi-tasking is just a modern phenomenon, how monotasking can result in more work being done at a higher quality, how technology has permanently changed the landscape for attention, the usefulness of walking between tasks, why tasks can get more difficult before they get easier again and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Learn how to skip college and get Praxis’ free book on the success mindset at https://discoverpraxis.com/modernwisdom/ (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on everything from Lucy at https://uk.lucy.co/ (UK) or https://lucy.co/ (US) (use code: MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The 12 Monotasks - https://amzn.to/3vXOZ8Z Follow Thatcher on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thatcherwine Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #productivity #multitasking #lifehacks - 00:00 Intro 00:20 Thatcher’s Multitasking Journey 06:35 Why is Multitasking Bad? 18:09 Experiencing Cancer 27:19 Advantages of Reading 39:14 Why Listening is a Skill 43:48 Benefits of Regular Walking 49:08 Learning & Teaching 57:42 Where to Find Thatcher - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So I think that's where it becomes hard, paying full attention instead of paying partial attention. Paying partial attention is easy. It just doesn't really result in your best work, or your most efficiency, or really being present with the people you care about, that you're hanging out with.

• 0:16Chris Williamson?

  Thatcher Wine, welcome to the show.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Thank you, Chris. It's good to be here.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  How did you arrive at thinking about multitasking and monotasking? What's the journey that's taken you to think about that?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a lot of it came out of my own personal experience. I'm the citizen of the world that we live in, which is super distracting to begin with. Got all this technology, constantly asking for our attention, our smartphones, computers, other devices. And then on top of that, I kind of threw in some personal challenges that were of the next level distraction variety. A few years ago, I went through cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Also an entrepreneur, had a business for about 20 years called Juniper Books, that's very creatively broad in what we do with books, and very demanding of a lot of my attention, and creativity and productivity. I'm also a parent, I have two teenagers.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  And I wanted to figure out a way to navigate all the things I was going through, figure it out for myself. And when I figured it out, I thought I could share with the world, when I learned about multitasking and monotasking.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  What was the genesis of that? Was there a point where you were juggling so many things with the family, with the work, with the health? Was there a particular sort of period of time in which everything kind of got a bit much?

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got to the point, basically, between 2016 and 2019, where I hit the wall. I just, there was, couldn't possibly have been more that I was dealing with at one time. And I was finding it really hard to switch back and forth between what I was going through for my health, for my business, for my family. And what I decided to do was kind of look back at how I'd done it in the past. So I'm a pretty productive person, and I'm pretty creative, and I'm also very ambitious. A lot of things I want to do in life. So I kind of looked back, how have I done this before? When have I not felt overwhelmed by it? And one pattern that I recognized was that when I gave my full attention to one thing at a time.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  I got things done well. People said, you know, the work is great. And my kids said, you know, we had fun. Like you get the feedback from the world. Um, that you're doing a good job and you don't feel so overwhelmed. But then, you know, once I layered on all these other distractions that I was dealing with, um, it just felt like I always had to be staying up late, getting up early, depriving myself of rest, not exercising, and just taking on more and more and more. And I never felt like I was caught up. So it's definitely in that three-year period, you know, where I was like, I gotta find a better way.

• 2:59Chris Williamson?

  Is there a tension between the amount of work that you can get done? And the amount that you focus on single things and the quality of work? Is there a way that all of those are kind of interlinked?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So, so there's a bunch of research that's been done on multitasking. And the research basically shows that when we multitask, so when we take on more than one thing at a time, usually of the cognitive variety. So like, you're doing an email and trying to listen in on a conversation, whether it's in Zoom or, or something else. Um, we tend to make more mistakes. And things take longer.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Part of that is due to the fact that we just can't multitask. What, what we call multitasking is actually task switching. So we're going from one thing to another. We're making it look like we're doing it all at the same time. We like to look busy, right? That's sort of an American trait especially.

• 3:51Chris Williamson?

  What people mean by what, when they think, what they think they mean by multitasking is parallel processing?

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, parallel processing, or it could be serial processing and, you know, you, you do one thing, then you do the next thing. Then you switch back to the other thing, back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth. The parallel processing might be more like background tasking and primary tasking. Where, you know, somebody might be listening to this podcast while folding their laundry, right? Most people can do that. But can I have this conversation and also be working on a presentation or response to a client? No, I can't do it. And I could pretend to do it, but I'd actually be switching back and forth. And basically cognitively overloading my brain and causing a lot of stress. Studies have been done that show it takes on average 23 minutes to switch from one kind of cognitive heavy task to another.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Because I like, if I tried to go from this conversation to my work, I'd need a little time to figure out like, where was I? What's this all about? What are my goals? Like reviewing it for mistakes and all that. So we don't often give ourselves that break, that 23 minutes, and it causes us to get overwhelmed and stressed out and burnt out, to be honest.

• 5:04Chris Williamson?

  What's the root of multitasking? Is this a perennial human problem? The philosophers of ancient Athens struggling with this as well?

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, for sure. It's definitely been around for thousands of years. Part of it is the, and that's an understatement, but it's part of it is the design of the human brain. Like, we're supposed to take in what's happening in our environment, be aware of the dangers. It's a wild animal off in the distance. Like, I gotta heighten my awareness and take care of my family. It's an ancient form of multitasking, right? Another one is like, I'm sitting here, but my mind is wandering. So can I bring it back to the present moment through prayer, meditation? Those practices have been around for a very long time. Modern multitasking, I think, dates to like the 1960s, when computers were introduced, and we started to think about how they could multitask processes, switching from one application

• 5:58Speaker 00

  to another. So like the 1980s with Windows, like you, everybody visualized it at their desktop computer. Oh, I can go from Excel to Word, you know, and my computer can run both applications at the same time. Well, if humans designed those computer programs, why can't we do the same thing? Why can't we teach ourselves to multitask? And then a lot of like employers started, you know, kind of asking, can you multitask? Like, we'd love to have you on the team, and we're gonna throw all this stuff at you. And then it became kind of glorified, and a lot of people brag about their ability to multitask. But it's not actually good for us, and it's not something we're particularly good at.

• 6:34Chris Williamson?

  Why is it not good for us? I understand why it's not something that we're good at.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it causes like a physical and mental strain on our bodies that we're just not designed for. So I mentioned the 23 minute statistic a few minutes ago. So when we don't give ourselves the time to switch from one thing to another, we get stressed out, we feel overwhelmed, we can't quite put our finger on it. But we, you know, there's a real bottleneck in our cognitive ability. So like, you'll have people these days, I hear a lot, like, I don't enjoy my hobbies anymore. I used to enjoy reading, I used to enjoy biking. But, you know, the fact that we always bring our phones with us everywhere.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  And a lot of people do something like make a call, scroll through social media. It creates a multitasking bottleneck in our brains. So we can't like have that feeling that we used to have of being in the present moment. Enjoying what we used to enjoy right now, right here and with the people we're with.

• 7:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it really does feel like we're not immersed in experiences as much. You know, I kind of, I critique myself all day about this. I'm in a taxi journey, good example, I was in a taxi journey to go for dinner last night. And I'm sat in the taxi and I'm driving through South Congress. South Austin's really nice, got downtown coming toward me. I can see the Capitol building sort of through the dark front windscreen next to the Uber driver. And I was thinking, this is really, really nice. And I was just watching, but I had to consciously think about not picking up my phone to check if, oh, maybe there's an email that I can get to right now, which is going to make tomorrow a little bit easier because I want, I want to have that email to do.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  But even that, even though I decided not to task switch, the ambient sort of parallel processing world or multiple multitasking world. Even the thought of that took me out of the present moment and being immersed in it as well. So, you know, there's like, there's gradations of how distracted you can be when you're doing stuff. But I really, really value that memory, you know, thinking back about last night and seeing the Capitol building coming in and it's cool. And there aren't so many skyscrapers in Newcastle where I'm from. So it's a different sort of view for me to see. And I really value that. But it's so easy to avoid it. Did, have you thought, I'm going to guess that you must have realized that boredom plays

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  a pretty big role here, that a lot of the time what people are doing with multitasking is probably sedating themselves from the boredom of one thing with another thing.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  A hundred percent, yeah. So, you know, what was going on in that, that car ride, you know, is that we've trained ourselves or we've been trained by technology and our devices and despite the fast paced modern world we live in, that we never have to be bored. As soon as anybody gets bored these days, like our tendency is to reach for our phone. As soon as we feel like, oh, I've got whatever I'm doing right now down. I'm going to layer something else on. So it's, it's just a habit and we have to go easy on ourselves that like, it's not our fault that we're reaching for our phone. Like there's billions of dollars and lots of people on the other side of that convincing us that that's what we should do.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Um, what I, the, the book, the 12 monotask that I wrote, um, there's a chapter in there called getting there. And it, it's all about, you know, how to pay attention to the journey. Whether that's your commute or you're, you're in a new city or you're, um, you know, going on a trip and seeing something new like, and just sit with the fact that, you know, look out the window. Pay attention to the things you've, you've never seen before or something, you know, if you've taken this ride a thousand times, maybe you will notice something new. Or maybe you'll just like monotask your boredom and be okay with that. And, and then not reach for your phone so quickly in the future. Um, there's also like this big impulse to be like, oh, that's really cool. I have to take a picture. And it's like, no, you were there.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  You, it's okay. You know, the experience was great. You remember it. You had that feeling. And just the, like the act of even thinking about taking a picture and layering on something else like can really take us out of that moment and that feeling of happiness and joy of being where we are.

• 10:53Chris Williamson?

  What technology's done, and not to lay all of the problems of multitasking at the feet of technology, right? Like this is, as it seems, a perennial desire for humans to constantly rid themselves of boredom by any means necessary. But it's driven the price of removing boredom essentially down to zero. It's made it, it's made it frictionless for us to be able to get rid of that at any time. So at the slightest sign of discomfort, what we do is we then escape that. We're waiting in line somewhere, we're on a journey somewhere. And for the people, pretty much everyone has some form of productive work that they can do on their phone, even if that's just answering personal emails or swiping stuff is unread. So you can always, there's a kernel of truth in it, right? That, well, this is.

• 11:38Chris Williamson?

  Productive, this is me being useful and this journey is going to happen anyway. You know, I'm going to town, I might as well use it for something useful.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  What is it about monotasking that makes it so hard then? Because when you think about it, it sounds like it would take more effort to do two things at once instead of one. And usually the human system is pretty good at finding ways to be lazy. So it's kind of counterintuitive that monotasking is difficult.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  That's a great observation. And I talk about that a little bit in the book, like if it were easy and obvious, it would be a very short book and I wouldn't have that much to say. But it's actually, it is really hard and anybody that's tried to do one thing at a time instead of multitasking, you know that. So I think it also think it's really simple. That's one of the greatest compliments I get. It's like, this is so simple, yet powerful. Like, it should be simple. We should just be able to decide like, hey, I'm doing five things at once. I'm going to pick one, I'm going to do it with my full attention and I'm going to move on to number two. The reality is that like multitasking has become very pleasurable

• 12:48Speaker 00

  in some respects, like you think about media multitasking, like you sit on the couch with your phone, you're texting, you're watching Netflix, you've got your computer on, you know, maybe occasionally popping in and checking an email. I think everybody can relate to that, like you just relax and like you don't, you're not really getting much done. You're not paying full attention to anything. So I think that's where it becomes hard. Paying full attention instead of paying partial attention. Paying partial attention is easy. It just doesn't really result in your best work or your most efficiency or really being present with the people you care about, that you're hanging out with. So I think it's pleasurable. I think it's habitual, you know?

• 13:33Speaker 00

  So like everything in the world is just glorified multitasking culture. Made you think you can do it and you're going to be celebrated if you do it. And here are some, you know, celebrities and famous people that do it on, you know, run their fashion empire in between, you know, playing tennis matches or whatever.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  So it's hard and I think we, once you do the work and you, you get more accustomed to the feeling of what it feels like to do one thing at a time, you recognize like, hey, this isn't something I've felt in a while. Then that becomes more rewarding than the multitasking. Then you start to recognize like what you recognized in the car like, hey, I'm not paying full attention here and I'm not enjoying this really cool view. Like, what if I could do that? And then you you do it and then you like start to make more of those moments in your life. The more practice you do it, the better it become.

• 14:24Chris Williamson?

  I think that very much the best work that we do is when we're focused on a single thing. And beyond the fact that we can't really multitask and it's making our work take longer and it's not as psychologically fulfilling. I think the main difference that I've noticed with my friends that are able to go sort of hard and deep with one particular task is the level of output in terms of the the quality of the work, the level of creativity or ingenuity or just they are able to get to a higher level by focusing on one thing. And the most important thing, when you think about what you're competing with everybody

• 15:08Chris Williamson?

  else on, you're not, you're very rarely in a job where you're competing on the volume of work that you can put out. Like, the best pitch that wins a new client over is not the pitch with the most words or the pitch that's been sent the most times or the the company that puts the most ideas across. It's usually the company that has the single best idea. The person that gets the job isn't the person with the longest CV. It's the person with the best CV with the highest caliber of work. And increasingly, you see this in in the world of podcasting or YouTube, right? The best YouTubers and podcasters on the planet, they're not the people that put out the most videos. Now, there might be some correlation between consistency of content and how popular they are in the market, but it's not about that. It's about the fact that when you sit down and listen to whoever your favorite podcaster

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  is, you know that that's going to be a really, really high quality podcast. So you don't care about the fact, someone could livestream their life 24 hours a day, but if it's not good, it doesn't matter. And it's going to be beaten by the guy that does one amazing hour of work per week because he's fully focused on it. So I think that there needs to be an understanding, a sort of a cultural change, so that people realize that you genuinely aren't competing with other people based on the volume of work that you put out. You're competing with it based on the quality of the work that you put out.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of fear that, you know, if I'm not creating this huge volume of work and making it and telling people about all the things I'm doing and all the side hustles I have and all, you know, the accomplishments, like, then I'm somehow failing. But, but you're absolutely right. It's, it's about quality, not quantity. Almost all success in life. And, and that comes from, you know, I reference in the book, Cal Newport, and deep work. Like, you have to, like, focus, do your, when you get into the space of, like, deep work, and you learn how you do your best deep work, like, then you can do it. You can do it more often, and you can be more successful. And you can take on a lot of things in life.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Like, so I have a business, I'm a parent, written a couple of books, like, it's a lot of output. The only way I can do it is by doing one thing at a time. I can't write a new book while I'm, you know, talking to a customer on the phone. But I can do both in life. And I, and I don't think that people should, you know, scale back their expectations of what they do. I think they should just do them one at a time. And, and I think there's a lot of fear, you know, at the beginning, when people are so used to multitasking. It's like, I can't, I can't slow down, you know, then I won't be as productive. And what if I slow down and then, like, I can't get back up to speed if I want to? You know, so there's, like, any making any habitual change like that, like, it takes some courage to take

• 17:52Speaker 00

  the first step, give it a try, and then realize, oh, I'm actually going to get more done, to do better quality work, going to be more connected, and I'm going to be better at, like, everything in life, to be a better listener. And that's not just going to help me get the customer, but have a better relationship with a partner.

• 18:10Chris Williamson?

  How did cancer change your view on this stuff?

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, cancer changed everything in my life. I mean, I was a healthy person beforehand, very active, and then discovered I had three tumors in my chest and had to go through pretty intensive chemo, about 100 hours a week times six rounds. So it was pretty grueling. And what I didn't know is that that was just going to be the beginning. When I went through chemo, everybody was like, oh, chemo is so hard. You're going to be sick, you're weak, you're going to lose weight, you're not going to want to eat. Nobody really told me how long it was going to take to recover from it and get my energy back. But it took like, close to four years. And part of that was because I pushed myself too hard

• 18:55Speaker 00

  while I was going through treatment to keep up with work, try to, you know, ride my bike. Afterwards, I like tried to keep up appearances. You know, I was like, the really hardworking, creative, optimistic guy. And I was like, I feel like crap. And I didn't want people to know that. And I was like, I just get a good night's sleep if I just like, you know, take a day off. If I just get this work done, maybe I'll feel better. And nothing worked. And it really just took a lot of time, a lot of like, micro adjustments. And so I think it gave me this perspective that like, you know, what if I never get back to my full strength? What if I have to slow down? What if I can't pretend, like, what

• 19:38Speaker 00

  if I can't fake it till I make it? And so I made a lot of adjustments, like in my mindset, in my like, diet, in my daily routine, and the like, where I gave my attention. Because like, that was the one thing, even though my body didn't feel good, and even though I was exhausted, like, I could give my attention to things and choose where to apply that. And knowing that it was kind of precious and limited, you know, I decided to like, really become a keen observer about my attention, my focus, distractions in the world, and try to manage them a little bit better in order to get more done.

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  It's wild that 600 hours of chemotherapy still wasn't enough to slow down your desire to multitask in the first place.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I...

• 20:34Speaker 00

  You know, I, yeah, that's a good observation. Everybody said like, slow down, you know, take care of yourself, you know, you'll have time to do, you know, whatever you're trying to do on your laptop at the, you know, the infusion center later. Um, but no, I didn't listen because I think I thought, like, I did a lot of work observing myself, like, on the side effects and kind of making those micro adjustments I talked about, like, you know, take aloe vera juice for, you know, my stomach soreness and whatever. Like, I had a million tips and tricks that I'd figured out and learned from other cancer patients and practitioners. Um, but I still didn't want to slow down. Yeah. I mean, that's,

• 21:17Speaker 00

  and I could like, I, you know, relate to other people in this world, whether they're going through cancer or something else. They're just trying to get their startup off the ground while working a full-time job. Like, it's life. Everybody's going through something and, um, you know, there's a lesson to be learned in all of it. And I think we just always have to, you know, learn from it and make some adjustments to optimize our happiness and our stress levels and our performance.

• 21:42Chris Williamson?

  One of the things I've been thinking about recently is a hourglass shaped or a bottleneck shape that a lot of journeys and sort of passion projects that then perhaps become businesses or, you know, relationships that then get a little bit more serious that they tend to follow. So this is complete bro science. So just bear with me. Um, at the beginning, when you do something, it's usually new, the novelty motivates you, it's casual, so there isn't that much pressure. This, you know, let's run this for both relationship and passion project that becomes business, right? All of these things are true for both of those. There's little pressure, there's no sunk cost fallacy, there's no investment, you don't feel like it's part of your, um, identity. People don't really care that much

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  about you doing it. It's just a thing that you're doing for fun. Over time, the level of pressure and scrutiny that you and other people place on you, the amount of investment that you have, the amount of work that you need to do, the amount of tasks and different areas that you need to try and bring together in an effective manner, those start to ramp up, but you haven't got to the Stage yet where you've done it for so long that you can either delegate control to somebody else or kind of operationalize some of the common challenges that you face so that you become easier at it. It becomes easier to you. So you go from the wide neck, right? It's easy, casual, less pressure to the narrowing in the middle section, which is when you've got more pressure, more workload, more tasks to try and do.

• 23:10Chris Williamson?

  Greater sense of obligation to the people around you and to the people that you work with. But then I do think that out the other side of that, you can actually get yourself to a place, especially in a business where maybe you've recruited an assistant and maybe there's a manager now. And maybe you've operationalized stuff and maybe you've got a social media team in to come and look after stuff. And maybe you've got somebody in that's going to do finance and someone's going to do marketing. And you don't have to do your own schedule anymore. And it actually, it does follow a very odd sort of curve shape. It goes from easy to difficult to easy again. However, what you realize is that the strategy that got you from easy to difficult was putting your nose against the grindstone was going, right, I'm going to go as hard as possible. I'm going to do everything. I'm going to be across everything.

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  And every business person that's listening knows how difficult it is to let go of control, to delegate and to relinquish the tasks that you usually do to new people. Because you know that they're going to get it wrong, at least a little bit more than you do right now. And letting go is, it makes you terrified. So a lot of the time, you don't ever allow yourself to get out the other side of that hourglass bottleneck, to find the easy stuff that's on the other side or in a relationship as well. You know, you're going to have, most disagreements in relationships are going to center around probably five things, you know, it's going to be consistent thing that happens. You choosing to do one thing instead of another, you choosing to not do this thing instead of that. Those are the disagreements that are fundamentally going to happen. So operationalize those as well.

• 24:36Chris Williamson?

  But if you don't allow yourself to be able to come up with the solutions to delegate control in a business or to try and, I guess, break down those challenges in relationships, you just stay in that middle section. So yeah, that's my, that's my COD psychology solution for you.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I love it and I can totally relate to that. You know, so I've had my business, Juniper Books, for 21 years now. And not to disappoint any, you know, entrepreneurs, people starting up companies like it, it never really gets.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  It gets easier and then it gets harder. I mean, I don't know if it's one hour glass shape or it's like

• 25:10Chris Williamson?

  Multiple. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Because I'm going through a lot of that right now. I'm, you know, especially as I'm trying to like work more on promoting monotasking and sharing the message with the world. Like I'm trying to delegate more and more. I have 20 employees. Every one of those people does something now that I used to do for myself. So I've got like 20x, you know, my capability or whatever, which is awesome. Like that's where you want to get to. But then like, you know, I gotta get another like 5% off my plate. Gotta find the right person, gotta train them, um, you know, but once I get them up to speed, like then I'm gonna help like manage them to build their team. So, yeah, so not to disappoint anybody out there that they're gonna be on the easy street at some point. Um, but yeah, you have

• 25:52Speaker 00

  to work on it and you figure out a lot of things along the way. Um, and I do think it's true, um, you know, with relationships and our personal life and our hobbies, you know, it's like, yeah, you can learn how to do a new sport and then you can get better at it, you know, and then you have your setbacks and then you, you know, work on it again. And it's life and I think we should go, we should be realistic about the learning process and the ups and downs that we're gonna encounter. A lot of people like look at a lot of like the stories you read in the press, you know, like, oh, so and so, you know, raised a billion dollars, sold their company, whatever, like

• 26:31Chris Williamson?

  Whilst being an endurance racer and building a family and doing all of this other shit.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, those are the stories that are great for the press to tell. It's not, you know, what for every one of those, there's, you know, 10,000 other people. Um, and a lot of them like you'll never hear about and they figured it out and they're running their businesses day to day and they have a great life. And like, that's, I think, what most of us should aspire to. Um, yeah.

• 26:56Chris Williamson?

  There's a, a quote that I saw the other day that says, "You want everybody to know your name and nobody to know your face." And I think that that kind of just highlights the people that have that huge outlier success, like that, that outlier is by definition, as opposed to the people that just iterate steady away on something that works. So given the fact that you have your book company, plus you're an author, perhaps unsurprisingly, you said that one of the most important monotasks was to read. So what's the advantage of reading, especially given the fact that a lot of people that I know talk about reading, but what they mean is listening to books on Audible. So their consumption of books is actually the same way as you would do a podcast,

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  because maybe they they struggle to sit down and focus on a book for a long period of time.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  So I've thought a lot about reading because I've been in the book business for so long. And I've thought about like, you know, how do we, what benefit does it provide us besides just like entertainment or information? So we can get information from an audiobook or a podcast.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  And, you know, what I've, what I came to the conclusion about is that like, reading really helps us build our focus so that, and then we can apply that focus to other parts of our life. And when I looked around at successful people like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett, like they're big readers. Some of the busiest people in the world are some of the biggest readers. Like, how do they have time for that? Why do they bother? Like, couldn't they just be going and like, starting more companies and making more money? And what I saw is that there's a correlation between, you know, the habits of successful people, their ability to pay attention, and then their ability to be successful in life. And so I think what reading does for us, and I do think it's great, like however you

• 28:42Speaker 00

  get your books and information, is great. That's better than not reading. So, but I do think there's something special about the printed page. When you bring your, when you hold a book in your hands, it like takes up space and has like a weight to it, you're like, you're in one place.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Your attention, looking at the page, is in one place too. And it goes, you know, down one page and then up to the next one. And people like create these spatial maps in their minds of like where they read something, where they were, they may not be aware of this, where certain things happen in the book. You have that feeling like, how far into it am I? Am I about halfway through? Am I near the end? Oh, shoot, like, I don't want the story to end. Like, real readers can relate to that. And I think all that's good for us. And I think it's a feature, not a flaw, that we can't multitask while we're reading. It's one of like, the true monotask that I, you know, came up with this idea about monotasking for. It's like, you can only read a book while you're reading a book on paper.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Audiobooks and Kindles and stuff like you can multitask. And I think that's a good thing. And I think if we read for a little bit every day, like it strengthens our, what I call our monotasking muscles and our ability to pay attention. And then we can apply that to our work, to our relationships, to our hobbies.

• 30:01Chris Williamson?

  You know what it's like to read a paragraph and then to realize that you've been distracted and someone could hold a gun to your head and say, tell me what happened in that last paragraph. And you're like, dude, I'm, I'm sorry. And your eyes have tracked it all the way. And that's so fascinating, the way that our focus works, the way that we can be doing something kind of passively. And yet our mind can be completely somewhere else. And then we kind of, you catch yourself having not been where you were, which is such a bizarre sentence to say.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  I mean, that's, that's multitasking, right? So yeah, you're pretending to read the book, you're monotasking, but you're thinking and your brain is somewhere else. So that's multitasking. There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, yeah, you're not, you have to go back and reread that paragraph. That's fine. That happens to everybody, even like the strongest, most focused people in the world.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  But, um, you know, I think just having that awareness that like, that's essentially what's happening, you know, with everything else we're doing in life. You know, like if I was having this conversation and thinking about lunch or something like, it's the same thing. It's not like terrible for us, you know, I may not, you know, be as speaking as clearly as I struggle to find my words. I'm like, like, maybe I am thinking about lunch, but, um, you know, I think it's just like having that awareness, going easier on ourselves and then saying like, what if I did give my full attention to what I'm doing right now? Either the book, this conversation, the walk that I might go on after this, like it's different, you know?

• 31:30Speaker 00

  And, and I think it's not only good for what we do in the moment, but it like really strengthens our monotasking muscles that have atrophied. Thanks to technology and a lot of other stuff. And then we can, we can apply them, you know, and then be more successful and have more fun.

• 31:45Chris Williamson?

  What would you advise to people who perhaps are the audiobook connoisseur that I've just mentioned, but are struggling to sit down? They sit down to read a book and they can't, they can barely even get through half a page before they want to fidget and move around and then leave it.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'd say it's, you know, start where you are and it's, it's not one thing or the other. So I listen to audiobooks, but I also read a lot of books. I've started, so I think like any amount that you could spend reading on paper daily is good for you. Start with five minutes. In the book, I talk about 20 minutes as being like an optimal amount. And start with something easy. Reread a book you loved in childhood. I don't care if it's Dr. Seuss, like start with something on paper. I love to reread like J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut. I've got a bunch of those books on my shelf behind me. Like, they're pretty fast, you know, going, easy reads. Don't start with War and Peace, right? Like, don't, or a medical journal or something like that.

• 32:42Chris Williamson?

  Red Rising. I'm telling you, if you need a book to get into, get Pierce Brown. Red Rising is the one.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Yep. We, we make like a special edition set of Red Rising.

• 32:52Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Books, yeah. And it's, yeah, it's one of our most popular offerings.

• 32:55Chris Williamson?

  Dude, he's, he's absolutely crushed it. So I put a, I'm gonna go on a complete segue. I put a tweet out the other day saying I was struggling to find something as good as Pierce Brown's Red Rising, or Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, and then whatever the Way of Kings, or I think the second one was. And I got a ton of interesting responses, but I think one of the things that you, one of the things that I found that's interesting, there's two types of fiction books that I've been really enjoying recently. One of them are unbelievably fast-paced. So something like Red Rising is just like unrelenting. Something happens and then everybody's dead, and then everybody's not dead, and then there's a spaceship, and then, you know, someone takes

• 33:39Chris Williamson?

  over a planet. But then if you look at Rothfuss and the way that he writes, it's so slow. It's genuinely pedestrian. You know, you get to know Gvoth, the guy who is the main protagonist in the books. You get to know his daily routine. You get to know his walk to work, like his walk to when he goes to go and play his lute at the local pub that he plays in. You, you know the color of his room, you know, the shape of his room, and it's so slow and pedestrian, but I really, really enjoyed that. And I wondered, it kind of makes me think about the multitasking versus the monotasking appearing kind of within a narrative, that you've got one book. And I felt, you know, I really, really enjoyed Red Rising, and Pierce is gonna come on the show once he's

• 34:22Chris Williamson?

  finished the next one, which I'm excited about. But there was an extra level of It was like, uh, like taking a bath or something, just real luxuriating in the slowness of the narrative when you read The Name of the Wind. And, um, it's so good. It's fantastic.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  I mean, at any given time, I've got like five different books on my nightstand. I, I, and I just like, depending on the mood I'm in, like some days you've had a really stressful day and like, you can't take the like really deep literary fiction, like, and you want that page turner, or you might just want like a biography and like read a paragraph before you fall asleep, you know? So I think people should, don't feel like if you read one thing and it doesn't work for you that like, oh, I can't read. Like find the thing that works for you. Read like a magazine, you know, you pick up in the airport and just, you know, that might be what you're feeling that day. I think the other thing is a good tip, uh, that I share is if you love audiobooks and you loved a particular

• 35:19Speaker 00

  book, pick up the print copy. Like you'll have that familiarity with it. It'll be in a relatively easy read. You'll still get something new out of it. Um, and it's a good place to start reading on paper.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  One of the things, I know that we're talking about print books here, but if you've got a Kindle, um, like a Paperwhite or whatever, there's a, an extension for Google Chrome called Send to Kindle. And you press a button and the webpage that you're looking at, let's say it's a blog post or whatever, it'll appear on your Kindle, fully optimized, highlightable, in complete Kindle font where you can adjust everything and the margins and all that stuff. And it just means that it turns your Kindle into an e-reader for the stuff that you see on the internet. So now as I'm going around and people send me articles or whatever during the day, or I've got a summary of Thatcher Wine's, the 12 Monotask book or something, I think, well, I can press this one button. And then at some point when I decide to open

• 36:15Chris Williamson?

  it up, it's all going to be sat there in my library. So that for me is a much better way to read articles as well, rather than reading it on Medium on my phone or on Substack on my laptop or something like that. You know, you receive a Substack from someone, press the title on the top, you go to the webpage, press the center Kindle, there you go, there's Scott Alexander's new blog post, sat like a book. And, and you know, it's going to take you maybe 15 minutes. So that's your read the next morning. Sometimes if you're finding it difficult to get into books, perhaps articles via e-reader might be a, a good place to look at as well.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's an interesting concept. And I think, you know, I wonder if that like creates a mindset shift for you that you're not just like mindlessly surfing the web.

• 36:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's purposeful.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. So it's like your reading, it's your information consumption. It's your checking in on, you know, the authors, whereas, you know, so much of the algorithm driven stuff that we're fed, you know, is just kind of mindless and it's so hard to stop.

• 37:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's the environment that you're in, right? You know, you're sat, the guys, Rob Henderson is able to read full journal articles. My buddy Rob is able to read full journal articles on his phone. Dude, that is superhuman, being able to do that. I can't believe that someone could read, you know, a very dry, extended piece of work on the phone, because for me, that environment just isn't conducive to deep focus. And, you know, a laptop's only a little bit better than that. But again, what's the environment that you're in?

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:47Chris Williamson?

  You've got Kindle in hand. There's no swiping, there's no bings, there's no bongs. And then a paper book is one step further from that.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, everything can be monotask. So like all those little tips and tricks, like, you know, instead of being in this like information overload, I'm on a web browser, I've got these notifications coming in, just being like, I'm going to monotask this journal article, or this, you know, whatever medium piece, or the story, like, you know, and give it your full focus. And, and, you know, people have been asking me, like, can you monotask social media? And, you know, I think you can, like, it's super distracting. But when I do it, I basically go in with a purpose. I'm creating something, I'm either applying the creating monotask that's in my, my book, and just thinking of it as a creative act that I'm putting up a post. Or I think of it as playing, like, I'm just having fun, you know?

• 38:38Speaker 00

  This is like, you know, a joke, it's a whimsy, whimsical thing I'm doing, like, I just want to connect with the world through my humor. And if I'm looking at other people's stuff, like, I'm pretty much just like going to figure out what my friends are doing, or what this person said, and then I'm getting out of there.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  And it's hard. I mean, everything is designed so that you don't do that. So you stay and an hour later, you're like, what am I doing? Where'd the time go?

• 39:05Speaker 00

  But I think, you know, you can make that decision, kind of like what you're talking about. It's like, I'm going to reframe it and I'm going to, you know, use my time wisely to get what works for me.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  Reframing the experience and what you tell yourself about it as well. You know, if you do get distracted, this is something that I struggle with. If I spend, you know, an hour accidentally falling down some YouTube rabbit hole. And before I know it, that's an hour of my day gone. And I think, oh, you idiot, you had so much stuff to do. And look, you've just spent the last hour learning about some crypto NFT scam that Jake Paul's going to get sued for or like something that you're never ever going to use. So I've been working a lot on trying to reframe the stories that I tell myself about my multitasking and monotasking. Did you come across information foraging and the theory of information foraging during your research?

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, I don't think I'm specifically familiar with that term, but I can imagine what it is.

• 40:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so the, it was Sam Harris had a neuroscientist on that was talking about parallel processing and multitasking. And he said that in the same way that squirrels are nut foragers, humans are information foragers. And for pretty much all of our history, the people that had the most information were the ones that had the biggest advantage. And then at some point within the last hundred years of our evolution, it's switched from the person that has the most information to the person that's able to discern the information the best and actually stay focused on the most relevant information. So he uses this example, there's a mathematical formula that you can use to look at how many nuts are left in a tree and how far away the next tree is

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  to work out the likelihood of a squirrel leaving that tree to go to the next one. Because there's a cost that you need to pay to leave the tree and go to the next tree. But if the number of nuts that are in this tree start to diminish so much that the effort is worth changing. So he applied that to humans and information foraging. And he said that one of the problems we have with social media and Technology is that the friction from going from tree to tree has essentially dropped to zero. And this is one of those things where a lot of the time you'll read, you'll see an article that looks interesting on Twitter. Click on it, read the title, read the subheading, click off it, go back to Twitter to find something else. Like you've just selected an article that you thought to yourself would be interesting to read.

• 41:25Chris Williamson?

  And you managed to get through the first paragraph and then really enough, like I'll jump to another tree. So yeah, I think being aware of that, being conscious and mindful of that compulsion to go somewhere else is, is pretty important. And also what you were talking about earlier on, the fact that when you're having a conversation with somebody like this, not being distracted, not trying to think about other things. I think that the prescription for people to try and have a, a private podcast with one of their friends for, you know, half an hour or an hour per week, talking about something in a rigorous, focused way without distractions. It's so therapeutic and it makes you such a better conversationalist because you have the skill to be able to care about what the other person says. And you talk about this as well, right?

• 42:10Chris Williamson?

  That listening is actually a skill that people can develop and that they can monetize.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a whole chapter on listening in the book and one of my tips, um, I don't know if it's in the book or not, um, to be honest, but is listen as if you're recording a podcast, you know, listen like it's uncomfortable that you're paying so much attention to the other person. They're like, hey, what's going on here? Like normally you're looking at your phone, what happened? You know, that's, that's what we should do. We don't have to do it in every single conversation, but we should have the skills to do it. Nothing in our adult lives and maybe nothing in our, you know, childhood either these days. Like teaches us how to do that and rewards us for doing that. I mean, yeah, you might have friends that are like, I want to hang out with that guy. He's, he listens.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  But, you know, but in your kind of sort of rewarded, like, because I think listening is important to sales and customer service. And the success of businesses, like how well you listen to your customers and change your products and your marketing strategy. But it, nobody talks about it really as listening. So we don't like really measure it. We don't really tell people to develop that skill necessarily. It's super important, especially in relationships, um, you know, as a parent, like there's so much, there's some things that are said, a lot of things that aren't said. And if you're multitasking, you're not going to hear either. You might hear what's said. You're definitely not going to hear what's not said in between the lines or the words or whatever. If you're just thinking,

• 43:38Speaker 00

  looking at your phone or thinking about something else. Um, so I think it's super rewarding. I think we should do more of it.

• 43:45Chris Williamson?

  What about walking?

• 43:47Speaker 00

  So yeah, so there's a chapter on walking in the book and, and that kind of grew out of this idea that like, you know, we, we tend to combine our walks with other stuff, whether it's like, I'm walking for exercise or I'm walking, I'm going to make a phone call or I'm going to take pictures. Like, what if we just went for a walk? What if we just like, you know, opened our eyes, like looked up instead of down at our phones and, you know, saw new things. I'm looking out the window here. It's like gorgeous Colorado setting, super bright. I look super pale. That's a result. Um, but I should probably get out and get some sunshine. Uh, but you know, see things you've never seen before, hear sounds you've never heard before. Like if you're walking around a city, you might smell some things you never smelled before. And that's okay.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Hopefully it's like a bakery or something. Um, but like it makes us alive to, you know, absorb all the school stuff in the world and be grateful for it, to be honest, and, and practice that ability, like not to reach for our phone. Um, and just be a little bit bored, maybe. I don't think walking is boring personally, but some people might think it is and they might be like, I better go for a run. Um, but I think just like slowing down, enjoying the walk is, is very therapeutic.

• 45:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I am, I morning walk is the most important thing that I do as a part of my day. If I, if I get that in, even if it's just five minutes, the rest of the day is usually like noticeably better as opposed to the days when I've woken up too late or I've got too much to do and I can't fit it in. Even with that though, I find myself, I've been tempted to do, uh, diction, uh, pronunciation, exercise. Is while I walk or I'm gonna do, I'm gonna spend the entire walk thinking of all different things that I'm grateful for. So I set myself a challenge and that is still, I'm finding a way to, I've left my phone, don't take my phone out on a morning, but I've still managed to find a

• 45:37Chris Williamson?

  way to multitask a walk, which is specifically there to be this lovely oasis of calm first thing in the morning. And then there's me doing sinful Caesar sipped his snifter seized his knees and sneezed first thing in the morning as I'm walking around scaring all of the dogs and cats.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, one, you know, I mentioned the, the 23 minute statistic earlier about like switching from one task to another and how long it takes to prepare, you know, to get into the next task. So one way I think about walk sometimes is like, if you're gonna lose that 23 minutes anyway, you're gonna be sitting at your desk and be like, okay, what do I have to do? How do I get into the mind space for that? Like, maybe you should just go for a walk and, and use that as your reset time. 23 minutes, it's like, we're gonna lose it, get up, do something, clear your head. And it's, it's actually, I don't think it's that you should never multitask on the walks. You can use them purposefully, like what you're doing, because that, you could argue, like, the thing

• 46:39Speaker 00

  that you're doing in the foreground is actually your exercise and the background is just walking. So I think it's good to combine, kind of like your reading, it's like combine different types of walks. Have one where you're like doing nothing but paying attention to like the ground underneath your feet. Another one, maybe you decide like, I'm gonna like think of a new idea for this project.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  And then other ones, like you'll, you'll go out, you know, just planning to clear your head. And then you like the most creative idea will pop into your mind. Because you decided to do nothing. And if you had decided to do something like it wouldn't have showed up. And I think that's a really cool experience, especially for creatives and entrepreneurs. Yeah.

• 47:18Chris Williamson?

  That highlights the difference between walking and reading, right? That with reading, it's always a front brain task. You can't do something else whilst you read, whereas with walking, it's automated. Same thing goes for driving. You've got a, a part in there about getting there, right? Commutes and journeys and trips and stuff.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  Most people that are competent drivers are able to do something else mentally whilst they're navigating traffic with their hands and feet. So that means that there are different ways, I think, to probably look at monotasking and multitasking. I would probably classify being on a Zoom call whilst writing an email as a different sort of multitask to being in a car whilst thinking about something for work, or being on a walk whilst listening to a podcast. If there's something that you can outsource to system two, meanwhile, system one is, sorry, to system one, meanwhile, system two is actually active doing something else, I think that's quite different.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think we, like, just having the self-awareness to think about those things as being different and not lumping them all together. Like, oh, I have to multitask all the time, otherwise I'll never get anything done. Or I can't monotask, or I can only monotask. Like, there are different subtleties within it, like you were just talking about. There's the background tasking and primary tasking. Driving, making a phone call, laundry, podcast. And then there's like the cognitive heavy tasks. And if you can learn, you know, what you can and you can't do, then you can make better decisions about what stresses you out, what makes you productive, what makes you happy, what makes you connected. You can decide,

• 48:55Speaker 00

  like, I better not even take my phone out while I'm out on a date, because I know that, like, my brain's gonna look at it and I'm gonna be distracted and she's not gonna want to go out again. So I think it can be really helpful in all situations.

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  What about learning and teaching?

• 49:12Speaker 00

  So, yeah, so there's two chapters in the book, and to a certain extent, they're, you know, two sides of the same thing. But, you know, I definitely believe in, you know, learning, continuous learning throughout our lives. I like, have a lot of hobbies, and I'm trying to find more time to add additional ones, learn new instruments, take up new sports and all that. And I think having like a beginner's mind, if you're familiar with that, like a Buddhist term about like, I'm not a know-it-all about anything, even stuff I've been doing for 21 years. You know, there's always something to learn. And opening yourself up to the possibility and then monotasking the learning.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  Right. So saying like, I'm learning right now, like I'm learning how to, you know, talk about monotasking more better. I'm learning about, you know, how to manage my time, whatever. And then, you know, make those self-observations that we've talked about throughout the podcast, like, and then apply the lessons. Don't feel like you have to do what everybody else does. Don't feel like you have to learn how they learn.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Or do what they do. Find what works for you. And the other side of it is teaching, like the teaching chapter, people shouldn't skip it because they're like, oh, I'm not a professional teacher. I don't, you know, stand in front of a classroom, teach people. We're all teachers all the time. You know, I might teach my kid something just by them seeing me do it. Or a complete stranger might see how I like, talk to the waiter in a restaurant. Um, be like, oh, that's, you know, that was very respectful and empathetic and kind and then learn from it. Um, so, but, but on the other hand, like if you really, like somebody asks you, can you teach me how to play that song on guitar? You know, then I really have to think about, huh, like, how do I do it?

• 50:57Speaker 00

  How do I teach it? And it like creates this whole like next level monotasking that like brings your focus to what you know. How can you transmit it to somebody else? How are they receiving it as a learner? Should I make some adjustments? Um, and you can basically, you know, you can develop mastery of things that you weren't, didn't know you were an expert in necessarily, but somebody else thought you could teach it. Or maybe your own career, like you can take it to the next level just by thinking about, how would I teach this to other people? So it's pretty cool.

• 51:30Chris Williamson?

  What are the most common resistances that people encounter when they're trying to implement monotasking more into their lives?

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Um, you know, some people say it's, it's a, it's a luxury, like it's, you know, it's a privilege. Like, I don't have time. I have bills to pay. I, you know, have too much to do. You know, maybe when I'm retired, I'll be able to do that, you know? And I think that, um, you know, we get in our own way. I think there's a present moment, every moment, right here, right now, like with the people you're with, doing the thing you're doing, wherever you are. And if you recognize, like, I could either do two or five things in this moment, or I could do one.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  And if you do one, like, it's in the present moment, you're not, you know, distracting yourself and diluting yourself and your capabilities. So I think, you know, you give it a try and, and see if it works for you. Um, so I think there's just like a little bit of that fear, um, of people getting in their own way. That's one of the big ones.

• 52:33Chris Williamson?

  Losing memories and not being able to recall the things that you've done is one of the biggest advantages that I can see of this. The, I, I don't know how it works. I'd love to speak to a neuro, a neuroscientist and, and find out why it is that when you try and have two things in your mind at once, you can barely remember either of them. It's not like you remember 50% of a trip if you spent the entire trip obsessing about something for work. You just don't remember any of the trip and you probably can't remember what you were obsessing about to do with work either. And, yeah, especially because I'm out here in Austin and I'm meeting new people and going to new places and stuff. And I'm really, really conscious, like, I want to remember this. It's cool. It's the first time that I've been in another country for an extended period of time. I want to spend, I want to be able to look back and really enjoy the memories that I've created.

• 53:17Chris Williamson?

  And yet it's antithetical to the way that I spent most of the last 10 or 15 years of my life, trying to run a business, trying to be on WhatsApp whilst taking calls, whilst thinking about two or three or four other things all at the same time. So, yeah, I think.

• 53:35Chris Williamson?

  The quality of life change that you're going to have from monotasking would probably be worth it on its own, but then when you think about the increase in the quality of your output that you're going to have, the down regulation in terms of stress, all that stuff. Yeah, man, I mean, it's, it really is, I think, the perennial sort of modern person problem.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, modern, but yet an ancient problem, just, you know, a little bit more information.

• 53:59Chris Williamson?

  Weaponized with technology.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But I was at an event recently and, you know, just having a side conversation with somebody and I introduced myself and I said, hi, my name is Thatcher. He got, oh, I want to remember that. And he got out a notebook and he wrote down my name. And I was like, come on, my name is like memorable, right? I'm, it's not like John or something. But I was like, that's a great hack, you know, tip that he figured out for himself. Like, he has, he brings himself into the present moment. This person's name is Thatcher. I don't know if he made a note about what I looked like or something. It's monotasking. Like, everybody else is like, oh, hey, yeah. And then you forget what their name is, maybe because you were thinking about something else, maybe you're just bad with names, it doesn't really matter.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  But like, if you can find what works for you, whether it's to record those memories or something else, and let's just like fully pay attention, everything's better.

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  I would say, I realize this as well, that I had an aversion to taking photos for a while. And one of the reasons for that was I'd confused taking photos for posting on social media. You know, it's super cringe if you're out at dinner and somebody decides to try and take a million photos of the food, because you know that they're not taking the photo of the food because they want to remember the food, they're doing it because they want to flex on whatever social network about whatever food they're eating or whatever restaurant it is. And that had sort of made me feel a bit ick about recording the stuff that I did. But then Youssef, one of my good buddies, he's an absolute fiend with it.

• 55:32Chris Williamson?

  And I really, I very much appreciate and I'm envious of how many photos he has that capture the things that he's done. And I think that there's maybe a place, it's certainly something that I needed to stress test myself on, the fact that. Because I didn't like the idea of taking a photo for someone else didn't mean that I shouldn't be taking a photo just for me. And the difference between your man that's written it down in a notepad and said, hey, Thatcher, why don't we take a photo together? And just snapped a photo. I do think that there's probably a way that you can be quite present and quite monotasked whilst taking a photo. However, if it's performative and it's then being done for someone else, I think that that's where I draw the line.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  I think that's a great distinction. Yeah. I mean, I think if you're doing it for yourself, because like this is how you're fully present. If you're taking a picture of your food because you're like, you know, I'm gonna enjoy it more. I'm gonna taste the flavors. I'm gonna write about, you know, I want to remember like where on the plate this was positioned before I ate it or something. And then I'm gonna tell the story of it later. But, but I think that like, if you're, if you're multitasking it, like, you're not actually, if you're just thinking about what it looks like while you're doing anything. It's live concert or food or trip you're on or something like, if you're always thinking like, oh, this would look so cool to people who aren't here.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, it's one thing. And then if it's like, this will heighten my enjoyment of being in the present moment and my senses and, you know, my connection to these people.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Then it's a different thing. And I think we can, you know, social media is not great about drawing that distinction. Or teaching us anything really.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  But, you know, we can, you could think about it in monotasking and multitasking terms as a just way, as a way to frame it. Am I monotasking? Am I doing two things, but it's still the same monotask? Of eating, of walking, of traveling? Or am I doing two things and they're really multitasking because I'm here, but I'm thinking about that social media post that I'm gonna create later?

• 57:40Chris Williamson?

  Thatcher Wine, ladies and gentlemen, if you want to check out the book, it will be linked in the show notes below, the 12 monotasks. And if people want to find out more about you, where should they go?

• 57:50Speaker 00

  So I have a website. I have two websites, maybe three. Thatcherwine.com, monotasking.tips, and juniperbooks.com if you want to check out Red Rising and some of the other things we talked about. Awesome. I appreciate you. Cheers, man. Thanks, Chris. It's a pleasure.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company for me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. So y'all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 58:29Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.