The pleasure of doing one thing slowly

I want to make a case for doing one thing at a time, and I want to make it without using the word “productivity.” This is harder than it sounds. Almost every argument for single-tasking I have read ends up, somewhere around the third paragraph, promising that you will get more done. Focus is a competitive advantage. Attention is a resource to be optimized. Do one thing at a time and you will do more things, faster and better.

Maybe. But that is not why I make tea the way I do.

Here is how I make tea. I fill the kettle. I wait for it to boil, and while I wait I do not check my phone or empty the dishwasher or draft a reply to the email that has been sitting in my head since breakfast. I stand there. I watch the window fog along its lower edge. I listen to the kettle go through its stages: the faint ticking, the rising hiss, the low roar just before the click. Then I pour, and wait again, about four minutes, and then I drink the tea, and that is all I do while I am drinking it.

The whole thing takes perhaps twelve minutes. A friend who writes software once watched me do it and asked, not unkindly, what I was “getting out of it.” I didn’t have a good answer at the time. I have been working on one since.

The productivity case treats attention like a tool you aim at a target. The better you aim, the more targets you hit. But some activities are not targets. Making tea is not a problem to be solved. Neither is mending a sock, or reading a novel, or listening to a record all the way through. These are things whose value lies almost entirely in the doing, and doing them while doing something else does not make them more efficient. It makes them disappear.

Consider the sock. Last winter I wore through the heel of a favorite pair — gray wool, bought years ago at a market stall. I could have replaced them. Instead I found a darning mushroom in a drawer, an object I had inherited and never used, and taught myself, badly, to darn. The first attempt took most of an evening and produced a lump that made walking feel like stepping on a small, opinionated pebble. The second was better. By the fourth I could do a reasonable heel in forty minutes.

None of this was efficient. New socks would have cost less than an hour of my time at almost any wage. But those forty minutes were among the most absorbing of my winter. Weaving thread across a hole, over and under, row by row, occupies exactly enough of the mind to quiet the rest of it. You cannot darn and think about your inbox. Well, you can, but the darn will tell on you.

This is the part of the argument that matters most to me. Doing one thing at a time is not a technique for getting more out of your time; it is a way of actually spending it. When I read with a phone beside me, I finish chapters, but I could not tell you much about them. When I read one book — not three in rotation, and with the phone in another room — I get through fewer pages and remember nearly all of them. The difference isn’t speed. It is presence. The first kind of reading is consumption. The second is closer to company.

I can hear the objection, because I have made it myself. Not everyone has twelve minutes for tea. Lives are crowded, work is relentless, and there are children and parents and bills. Single-tasking can sound like a luxury, a hobby for people with the leisure to watch kettles. I take the point. But I would suggest that the people with the least time are often the ones most in need of a few minutes that are not divided, and that those minutes don’t have to be long. Washing one cup properly. Peeling an orange and only peeling the orange. Walking to the bus without headphones, once.

The second objection is subtler: that this all sounds suspiciously like another self-improvement program, the wellness aisle dressed up in wool socks. Fair. But I am not promising that slowness will make you calmer, wiser or better at your job. It might. It might also make you late. My claim is narrower. Some things are only fully themselves when you give them your whole attention, and if you never do, you never quite meet them.

There is also a kind of honesty in doing one thing. It admits that you are a single person with a single body, in one place, at one time. Multitasking is a small fiction we tell about ourselves — that we can be in several rooms at once. Most of the time we end up in none of them.

So: make the tea. Watch the kettle, proverb notwithstanding. Mend the sock even though it would be cheaper not to. Read one book until it is finished, or until you decide it isn’t worth finishing, and then read another. Not because it will make you more productive, but because these are some of the few moments in a day that ask nothing of you except that you be there. That seems a small thing to give. It also seems, more and more, like the whole point.