An Easy Tip for Getting Focused Work Done

The Case for Mono-Tasking

Centered on Blue © Katharine Rawdon 2026

What do you listen to when you are writing or making art or doing your particular creative thing?

Many people put music on—maybe “light classical”, or jazz, or oldies, or new age. Others put a podcast on, to have some chatter in the background. It perhaps makes you feel less alone, or fool you into thinking you’re in a cozy café, typing away…

However, many people also complain about their ever-shortening attention span, distractedness, and inability to focus. We blame apps and social media, and I won’t argue with that.

My question is: to what extent are the first group of “many people” overlapped with the second group of “many people”?

Because the notion of multi-tasking has pretty much been debunked. I read way too many articles on stuff like this, so don’t ask for a quote, just believe me: your brain (my brain, our brains) are made to focus on one thing at a time.

Here’s a little experiment to try: watch a newscast. Try to follow the newscaster’s spoken story while also reading the crawl-text. In my experience, when I dip down to read the text, I invariable lose—temporarily, but critically—the thread of the spoken story. The brain cannot focus on two things at the same time.

(A tangential observation: until 9/11, crawl-text was an occasional thing; since 9/11, crawl-text is ubiquitous. The message is: we have a constant crisis…)

You will argue: but I can drive and listen to a podcast! Or: I can cook dinner while looking after my 3-year-old. True. But in the case of driving, a good deal of the attention required runs on a subconscious system developed after much conscious training. And in the case of child-minding, these activities are not exactly simultaneous, they are interleaved. Your brain ping-pongs from one activity to the other and back.

Now if you ping-pong back and forth between your creative work and your music or podcast (or YouTube, TikTok, IG feed…) you are effectively turning attention away from your work many, many times, even if briefly. And that, folks, is a recipe for frustration.

Silence is golden. Who said that? Beats me—but the next time you do creative work, give silence a try. In the West, we tend to fear silence as an absence or lack, but what if it turns out to be the perfect sound to work alongside?

Let me know in the comments if you give silence a try—or if you disagree fervently!