When the writer David Epstein had to get stitches in his head and was told to move slowly for a few days, he expected to feel annoyed. But instead, after three days of following doctors' orders, he found that he felt happy. 'I started tracking what I was doing in a journal to see if I could figure out what was going on,' Epstein recalls in a recent essay. 'My conclusion: It wasn't so much what I was doing as what I wasn't doing.' 'Whether I was reading, working on my computer, or brushing my teeth, I was 'monotasking,' concentrating on one thing at a time,' Epstein writes. 'Not being able to move quickly or turn my head had the effect of forcing me to focus ' I think the discomfort even helped: If I started to multitask, I could feel pain and tingling near the stitches. It was like I suddenly had some sort of multitasking monitor implanted in my skin.' It shouldn't take a medical situation to impel this kind of concentration, Epstein notes. But his experience was a reminder that...
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