The Art of Monotasking

Yes, monotasking, focusing on one task versus multitasking. And it truly is an art.  You mommies know well enough how to multitask. We do it all the time. In fact, I am multitasking right now. I am eating my lunch at typing up this post. Prior to jumping into this post, I checked my emails really quickly since I just finished monotasking so I felt like I needed to catch up on things before jumping into anything else.


Monotasking is to focus on a singular task and work on that until you are done. I am finding that as a stay-at-home working mother, at times, multitasking is not the best approach for me. When I divide my time between several tasks, then I essentially can finish some and not finish others and it also kind of leaves me a bit scatterbrained. Today, I had to focus on folding the laundry and putting it all away. For me, that means I just did about four loads of laundry in the past couple of days and I fold and put away all the laundry including the hubs, the babes and mine. In the past, I've tried to multi-task this one just like when I actually do the laundry - put laundry in, do some work, pull it out, do more laundry etc. When I try to fold the laundry here and there between doing other tasks, well what that's left me is a big pile of laundry that sits in one part of the house for daaaaays, as I slowly work it down. Not efficient plus I hate seeing it.

So, today I monotasked, I focused and you know what? It was really hard! It was hard not to pick up my phone if I heard a text go off. It was hard to keep my brain from thinking about all the things I needed to get done today or something that I was waiting for an answer for and "just let me check my email really fast". No, today, I would not let myself pick up my phone or look at my computer until every last piece of laundry was put away.

There's actually articles that talk about how we are less productive when we are multitasking and of course, that makes sense in context. Oftentimes, when I sit down to work, I will not check my emails either until the current task is done. It's amazing how much time is wasted just responding to, say, school emails.