You begin the day with a long list of priorities, but by evening, most remain incomplete. Despite constant activity, progress feels scattered and unsatisfying. The culprit? Multitasking. The solution? A focused shift toward doing one thing at a time.
The truth is, in today’s fast-paced corporate world, multitasking is often celebrated as a strength—but in reality, it leads to scattered attention and diluted results. By contrast, single-tasking offers a way to slow down, gain clarity, and achieve more with less stress. Here’s how it makes a difference:
- Sharper focus, stronger results – Concentrating on one task at a time significantly improves attention span and allows you to deliver higher-quality outcomes.
- Less stress, more clarity – Juggling multiple tasks creates mental clutter. Focusing on a single activity restores control and calm, helping you remain composed under pressure.
- Better collaboration – In team settings, single-tasking sharpens your communication. You’re less likely to confuse teammates and more likely to contribute clearly and effectively.
- Stronger sense of achievement – Completing one meaningful task at a time creates a sense of closure and satisfaction. This not only helps you reap the rewards of finishing what you started but also builds momentum for future challenges.
As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Small, consistent improvements—done one step at a time—compound into extraordinary results over the long term. The 1% rule from his book demonstrates how focusing on manageable, incremental progress can transform outcomes in powerful ways.
At a personal level, I have recently been spending more time prioritising my tasks and breaking each large task into smaller manageable chunks, in order to help me address one task at a time. We were at a workshop recently where we had a lot of preparation work left to do between a team of 4 people. A year ago, we would have tried to juggle all of these tasks at the same time and struggle to complete them and get enough rest for the workshop the next morning. This time, however, we had the knowledge to do three things –
- Delegate the multiple tasks and divide them up between the team of 4;
- Break each task down into smaller tasks in order to make them more manageable, and
- Do regular time checks every 20 minutes to make sure that we were all progressing and checking if the others needed any help.
Doing these three things made the entire process of preparation much more effortless. What would have taken us more than 3 hours to complete if we were less organised took us only an hour and a half, as we each took up tasks one at a time and were able to settle into a state of flow.
Outside of circumstances like the one outlined above, how can we practice single-tasking in a practical, everyday sense? Thankfully, there are a number of tools designed to help us stay focused:
- Pomodoro Timers – Break work into 25-minute focus sprints followed by short breaks, helping you train your mind to stay with one task.
- Task Managers (eg. Google Spaces) – Organize projects into smaller, sequential steps that can be tackled one at a time instead of all at once.
- Mindful Journals or Single-Task Lists – An analog option that works wonders: write down just one priority task for the day and commit to finishing it before moving on.
To quote Steve Jobs: “Focusing is about saying no.” The more we learn to cut out noise and direct our energy toward a single meaningful activity, the more effective, productive, and fulfilled we become.
By Kanishk Srinivasan
Facilitator
Korelate Learning
Kanishk Srinivasan is a Facilitator at Korelate Learning, where he brings together his passion for play, education, and growth to design immersive learning experiences. With a background in Sociology, Anthropology, and Conservation, he transitioned from community development to the play-for-learning space – driven by a belief in the transformative power of play. An outdoor enthusiast and multi-sport athlete, Kanishk brings energy, empathy, and curiosity into every learning space.
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