The Lost Art of Doing One Thing at a Time

Yesterday I tried to read a paragraph three times and failed, not because the words were hard but because my phone lit up between sentences and my mind went with it. By the time I returned, the thread of the idea had slipped. This is not a moral failing. It is what happens when we ask the brain to hold two things at once and quietly believe it can.

For years we called this skill multitasking and treated it as a virtue, something to list on a resume. But the research is unkind to the idea. The brain does not