How to Stop Multitasking and Be Present

You are on the phone with a friend who is telling you something that matters to them. At the same time you are answering an email, and glancing at a document, and half-thinking about dinner. You say mm and yeah in the right places. When the call ends you realise you could not repeat back much of what they said, and the email has a typo in it.

Most of us live a lot of our days like this. Two things at once, sometimes five. It feels efficient, even responsible: look how much ground I am covering. But at the end of those days there is an odd emptiness. Everything was touched. Nothing was really done, and we were not really there for any of it.

The same you, over less

Physics has a simple word for how much is packed into a given space: density. Spread the same amount of material over a bigger area and the density drops. Pack it into a smaller one and it rises. Nothing is added and nothing is lost. Only the concentration changes.

You are a fixed amount of attention. In the book I call spreading it over more and more surface horizontal stretching, and the alternative vertical depth. In plain words: the same you, spread over less, goes deeper.

Multitasking is horizontal stretching in its purest form. It does not give you two things at full strength. It gives you two things at half strength, and a third thing nobody counts: the constant cost of switching between them. The conversation gets half of you. The email gets half of you. Neither gets the whole person, and the whole person is what makes a conversation feel like one.

The doer and the watcher

The Raja Yoga tradition the book draws on makes a distinction that is more useful here than most advice about focus. It separates the world of doing, all the tasks, forms and noise, from the one who watches it. You do not need the Sanskrit names. You need the distinction.

There is the part of you tangled up in the task, and there is the part of you aware of the tangle. When you are stretched thin across five things, the watcher disappears. You become nothing but the doing: reacting, switching, catching up. When you go deep into one thing, the watcher is present the whole time, and the task becomes something you are bringing yourself to, rather than something you are lost in.

That is what being present actually means. Not a special calm state, and not doing nothing. It is doing one thing with you actually there.

What depth looks like on an ordinary day

It is less dramatic than it sounds:

Look at the second row. The change is not a technique. It is subtraction: the same conversation, minus the phone. Depth is mostly a matter of taking away the second thing.

The one-thing hour

If you want to feel the difference rather than read about it, try this tomorrow.

Choose one hour. Choose one thing: a piece of work, a book, a walk, a conversation with someone you love. Close everything else, physically. Phone in another room, other tabs shut, door closed if you can.

For that hour, whenever you notice the pull to check, switch or add something, let it pass and come back. You will notice the pull a lot. That is normal, and noticing it is the watcher coming back.

At the end, notice the odd feeling of having done less and finished more. That feeling is density. And if the one thing was a person, notice something else: they will have felt the difference too, even if neither of you says so.

This essay draws on Chapter 9 of The Inward Singularity, "Depth Over Breadth", which is free to read on this site.