Mono-tasking
The ability to be 100% focused on what you’re doing at all times is a big task, especially when there are a thousand things to do on any given day. As I’ve reflected on my time as a student-athlete, I’ve realized that what makes me and my fellow athletes so efficient and able to produce results is that we don’t multi-task.
Yes, you heard me right. We don’t multi-task; our jam-packed schedules doesn’t allow lost time. Athletes are efficient in the classroom and on the field because they manage their time and tackle one thing at a time.
The popular belief that many companies buy into is the idea that multi-tasking benefits everyone. The common thought is that if employees are tackling multiple tasks at once, they’re more likely to get more work done, which is beneficial for the company. But if a company really wants to increase productivity, they’ll encourage their employees to do one thing at a time.
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As I write this early on a Thursday morning, I am on the team bus, on my way to Wake Forest from Georgetown University for the first round of the NCAA tournament. We found out Monday evening that we will be playing in Winston-Salem on Friday evening. Six girls on the team ran to the bus this morning from an exam, and another two girls on the team had to reschedule an exam for a later date because of our trip.
If I’m being honest, I’m tired. I had two exams this week and I have another next week, but I also know that I won’t get another chance to knock out my homework for the weekend and get caught up with my schoolwork if I don’t do it on the road. I’m responsible for meeting the professors during their office hours and then teaching myself the material I will miss.
My coaches, working with the Big East Conference, plan our schedules for the week based on the premise that every team will travel at least once per week. This means that we’ll either travel for a mid-week game, missing Thursday or Friday classes (but we’ll be home for the weekend), or we’ll be home for our mid-week game and then travel for a weekend game (missing Friday classes). Simply put, we either miss class and have to make up the material, or we have little to no time to do homework on the weekend.
So, when athletes go on the road for a huge game and miss loads of school work, how do they have enough energy to get through it?
Mono-tasking saves energy.
Contrary to popular belief, we humans can’t do everything. Manoush Zomorodi, host of “Note to Self,” says that humans have a limited amount of neural resources that are used up every time we switch between tasks, especially for those who work online. According to a 2016 University of California, Irvine study referenced by Manoush, employees who work online will switch between tasks more than 400 times a day. “That’s why you feel tired at the end of the day,” she said. “You’ve used them [neural resources] all up.”
Ahh, that makes sense now. So, in other words, the figurative phrase “brain dead” becomes somewhat literal when we multi-task (okay, it’s not really literal, but spent neurons are spent neurons). Clearly, then, we should stop doing this. However, learning how to stop trying to do it all takes practice.
Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist and lecturer at Stanford, and the author of The Willpower Instinct, argues in a New York Times article that mono-tasking is “something that needs to be practiced.” She adds that “it’s an important ability and a form of self-awareness as opposed to a cognitive limitation.”
The intensity of preseason is physically and mentally draining, and it’s not uncommon for a freshman to wonder, “How will I survive when school starts?” At the beginning of their college career, student-athletes are stuck between either devoting more time to their academics or more time to athletics. Getting good grades and a significant amount of playing time is what all athletes want, but how do they accomplish both when it seems as if both require complete and total concentration?
Athletes don’t multi-task; they manage their time and mono-task to get things done efficiently. Athletes don’t have a choice but to focus on one thing at a time, because their productivity will decrease if they try to do it all at once.
“When you multi-task, you tend to make more mistakes. When you toggle back and forth between tasks, the neural networks of your brain must backtrack to figure out where they left off and then reconfigure.” — Dr. Earl Miller, MIT Neuroscientist
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If multi-tasking is counterintuitive, we should all try to be where our feet are… Sounds easy enough, right?
Wrong.
When you have a chemistry exam, an English paper, and tired legs on your mind, it’s hard to focus when you’re sitting in class. When you didn’t do as well as you thought you would’ve on that history exam (even though you stayed up all night studying), it’s hard to focus during practice. In order to get the most out of the task at hand, you need to be where your feet are.
Ann Latham, founder and president of the Boston consulting firm Uncommon Clarity, is an expert in how companies can increase productivity and drive high performance. In her time-management article for Forbes, Latham wrote, “If you have 2–3 priorities, you will complete 2–3 tasks. If you have 4–10, you will complete 1–2. If you have more than 10, you will complete none. I saw this on a Franklin-Covey video and I totally agree. The more items on your list, the more time you spend messing with the list, jumping from task to task, and feeling paralyzed by indecision.”
