When I teach people mindfulness skills, I often emphasize the importance of doing one thing in the moment. This is, indeed, one of the DBT mindfulness skills (“one-mindfully”; Linehan, 1993b; 2015). Doing one thing in the moment is kind of the opposite of multi-tasking. Instead of dividing your attention among many tasks at once, doing one thing in the moment involves focusing your full attention on the one task at hand. This task might be driving, eating, walking, talking with someone, working on something, getting dressed and ready for something, or any of the many things we all do each day. Some of these tasks involve many different components, such as driving, where you need to pay attention to lots of different things, shift gears, brake, weave in and out of traffic, and so on. One-mindfully driving, therefore, involves keeping your mind focused on the many tasks involved in driving. I often cook meals for my family, and cooking is surely another example of a multi-component task – one that might seem hard to do one-mindfully. When I’m cooking, I try my best to focus on whatever step I’m working on. This could be preparing spices, chopping vegetables, getting the slow cooker going, gathering things from the fridge, and so forth. Cooking requires a lot of preparation and coordination, especially if your meal has many parts to it, or if you’re making slightly different meals for different people (i.e., picky family members!). It might seem like a good idea, therefore, to try to do more than one thing at a time, such as frying onions while cooking rice or preparing meat. I find that getting a lot done while cooking doesn’t really require multi-tasking; it requires organization. If I organize things ahead of time, I can get a lot accomplished at the same time without actually doing more than one thing at a time. For example, while I’m chopping chicken for butter chicken, the slow cooker might be making the rice, I’ve put the garlic on, so it’s starting to sauté, and I’ve got the oven preheating and the cookies ready to go in the oven when we start eating (so they’re done by dessert time). A lot is happening at once, but I try to focus on whatever I’m doing in the moment, even if it’s only for a brief moment. A common misconception about doing one thing in the moment is that you can only apply this strategy to simple tasks. On the contrary, if you really focus one-mindfully on each activity throughout the day, you might find that each activity becomes a simple task. ~ Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.