Multitasking is dead, long live monotasking: Doing one thing well may be the real superpower in 2026

The kitchen, above all other spaces, is the multitasker's bordello. Even someone who's uninterested in juggling more than one lemon in the air - not just because he or she happens to be bad at juggling more than one lemon in the air - suddenly gets the urge to do at least four things simultaneously: stir the chicken after adding haldi before closing the lid on the pressure cooker like a pharaoh's tomb is about to be sealed; fill the empty bottles with drinking water from the filter machine; wash the dishes piled up in the sink (because you didn't feel like it when that was the only chore you had); get the rice ready in the cooker for its 2-step, water-submerged spin in the microwave.

And that's if there's no phone call, while a delivery man has just rung the doorbell, and your dog suddenly decides that that is the exact time when Pookie the Dragon requires some quality flying-in-the-air time. And I thought Susan Sontag had written, 'Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once.' She must have lived in another time.

But this isn't just about getting jobs done quickly. For that, in our blessed wage-arbitraged India, you can still jolly well hire 8 people for the price of 4. But I point to something else. Now, I'm no dimagi physicist, but I'm sure Erwin Schrodinger would have agreed that multitasking drives home the uncertainty principle: the more tasks you attempt, the less certain you are of completing any - or, at any rate, completing with any degree of finesse.


So, let me rip that old bandage off. Multitasking is dead! Long live monotasking. For too long, the cult of doing many things at once was hailed as the skill set that will get you to the Machu Picchu of success. We may all be replying to emails in the middle of meetings, booking a flight while scrolling 30SixCat reels, holding a conversation while stealing a selfie. But the result is half-baked ideas, half-read 'material', half-registered movies, and half-drunk vodka-Fantas. It's revolting - multitasking, not vodka-Fantas. And it's time to revolt. Monotasking cuts through the mob of activities and settles on one chase at a time, like outcome-driven serial monoamoury. In 2026, this won't be easy. Societal and peer pressure to conduct multiple tasks at the same time can be relentless or, worse, taken for granted. Charles R Johnson, CEO of Technical Education Corporation (TEC) that offered home study and vocational courses in electronic data processing in the 70s, famously told his salesmen to enrol anybody who could 'walk and chew gum at the same time'.

With the bar set that low, it was just upping the ante from there. (Incidentally, a 2021 Waseda University, Japan, study, published in Journal of Exercise Science & Fitness, did find that gum chewing while walking increases walking distance and energy expenditure in middle-aged men and women.)

15th-16th c. humanist Desiderius Erasmus, in his annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, Adagia, highlighted the ancient Greek poet Archilochus' observation that 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. While Erasmus - and 20th c. philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who expanded the idea of two types of dimagis in his 1953 book, The Hedgehog and the Fox - didn't take sides of either the wily or spiny mammal, neither gentlemen (or Archilochus) could have imagined how our age fetishises and valourises 'parallel workstream management'.

In the process, the casualty has been missing the product for the process, quality for quantity, optics for the real deal. With AI and other non-Gerald Durrell animals existing and thriving to multitask, monotasking is bound to be the human hedgehogian (or erinaceous, in Tharoorspeak) future. The question is whether you have the spines for monotasking or not.

So, employers, start rewarding it. Schools, begin teaching it. Families, cherish it. Lovers, insist on it. Mono-taskers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your sense of standing in a blizzard doing too many things at once and seemingly doing nothing at the same time.