Kill two birds with one stone

A man reading a book in a park.
(Photo: Tamarcus Brown/Unsplash | Text: David/ArtisanEnglish.jp)

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Proverb: Kill two birds with one stone

To begin with, we will not be killing any birds today.

We won’t be throwing any stones either, for that matter.

Full disclosure here, yes, I have killed my fair share of chickens in my youth while growing up on a subsistence farm in Atlantic Canada.


Anyway, to get down to brass tacks here, killing two birds with one stone means successfully doing two things at once. Let’s call it multitasking light.


People often try to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously, with the result being either accomplishing everything with low quality, accomplishing nothing at all, or doing only one of them well.

Killing two birds with one stone is a way to accomplish two things—it’s not three or four birds with one stone—it’s two.

The proverb was created out of the wisdom of our ancestors.

Killing two birds with one stone was good enough for them, and it should be good enough for us too.

Accomplishing this aim is reasonably straightforward in the modern world as long as your chosen tasks complement each other.

Something like washing dishes while listening to your favourite podcast is an excellent example.

You can use your hands for the dishes and your ears and mind for the podcast.

I’m not sure how you do it, but I don’t use my ears to wash dishes.

If you were planning to listen to your podcast while studying English, I’d try to dissuade you from doing so.

Those two tasks both require your brain and concentration. I know you’re a smart cookie, but you are only human.


This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 73.

The higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100, the easier the passage is to read.


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