Multitasking Is Killing Your Productivity - Thatcher Wine

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. (wind blows)

Thacher Wine, welcome to the show.

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

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

Yeah, so a lot of it came out of my own personal experience. Um, I'm a 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, uh, 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, uh, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Also, an entrepreneur, had a business for about 20 years called Juniper Books that was very, you know, creatively, um, broad in, in what we do with books and very, you know, demanding of a lot of my attention and creativity and productivity. Um, I'm also a parent. I have two teenagers. And, you know, I wanted to figure out a way to navigate all the things I was going through, figure it out for myself, and, and when I figure it out, I thought I could share with the world what I learned about multitasking and monotasking.

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, a particular sort of period of time in which everything kind of got a bit much?

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, you know, I... What I decided to do was kind of look back at how I'd done it in the past because I'm a pretty productive person, um, and I'm pretty creative, and, and there are, I'm also very ambitious. There are 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, you know, one pattern that I recognized was that when I gave my full attention to one thing at a time, 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, 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 was definitely in that three-year period, you know, where I was like, "I gotta find a better way."