I tried to do two things at once. I did neither.

What a lost chess game told me about my attention.

When I have time to kill, I open the chess app on my phone. While my opponent thinks, I put on a finance YouTube channel to catch up on the market.

I thought I could handle both. Then my opponent started taking my pieces. My knight went. Then my queen. I never noticed the move where it went wrong — by the time I looked, the game was already unrecoverable. I lost.

When the screen showed the result, I tried to reconstruct my mistakes. They were the kind you avoid by simply looking. Then I noticed the video was still playing, and realized I hadn’t taken in a single thing it said about the market.

I had overestimated myself. I thought I was using time well — hands and eyes on one thing, ears on another. But my brain only handles one. I wasn’t saving time. I was wasting it.

I looked it up afterward. Psychologists call this task switching. The brain doesn’t run two demanding things in parallel; it flips between them, and every flip costs something.

I used to believe I’d eventually get good at doing many things at once. After enough tries, I know I won’t. What’s left is a kind of helplessness.

But the real question isn’t whether I can. It’s why I need the video on at all.

I can’t seem to let my brain sit idle. The moment nothing is happening, something feels wrong. Maybe it’s the short videos — fast dopamine, small fragments — and now boredom is something I can’t stay inside of. I’ve lost the patience to do one thing properly, and I’ve been calling it “using time well” so I don’t have to feel how uncomfortable that is.

This week I’m trying one thing: play one game of chess with nothing else on.

Even if I lose, I’d like to think I’m taking some attention back. I’m not sure I can sit through it.