Stop Multitasking and Start Getting Things Done
The project coordinator sitting across from me was clearly pleased as she explained her typical routine.
“Multitasking is crucial in contemporary business,” she argued, despite the visible stress and poor results evident in her work.
Here’s the brutal truth that most modern employees don’t want to acknowledge: multitasking is completely impractical, and the pursuit to do it is sabotaging your productivity.
I’ve watched numerous talented employees burn out themselves trying to handle several tasks simultaneously, then wonder why they’re perpetually overwhelmed and anxious.
The science on this is undeniable, yet somehow the belief of beneficial multitasking persists in contemporary business culture.
The attention-splitting obsession has become so entrenched in modern professional culture that workers actually believe they’re becoming more productive when they’re doing multiple things poorly instead of one thing well.
Your mental processing wastes enormous quantities of cognitive capacity constantly switching between multiple tasks. All switch demands time to readjust, understand where you were, and recreate your mental framework.
The outcome? You spend more time changing between tasks than you dedicate meaningfully progressing on any of them. I tracked a marketing manager who insisted she was excellent at multitasking. Over a morning block, she moved between various projects 38 times. The real meaningful work time? Less than forty minutes.
The modern workplace has made the multitasking challenge dramatically worse.
You’ve got communications pings, instant messages, work management updates, meeting reminders, professional platform notifications, and smartphone messages all fighting for your focus at once.
The typical professional worker checks various digital tools over 400 times per day. That’s a switch every three minutes. Focused work becomes virtually unattainable in this situation.
I’ve consulted with teams where employees have multiple separate messaging platforms open constantly, plus multiple internet tabs, plus several project applications. The cognitive demand is staggering.
Here’s where the multitasking fallacy becomes especially dangerous: it blocks professionals from experiencing focused concentration periods.
Deep work – the capacity to concentrate without distraction on intellectually challenging problems – is where real productivity gets generated. It’s where innovative solutions happens, where complex problems get resolved, and where high-quality work gets created.
But deep work requires uninterrupted concentration for significant blocks of time. If you’re continuously changing between projects, you can’t access the thinking state where your best work happens.
The workers who deliver breakthrough outcomes aren’t the ones who can juggle the most activities concurrently – they’re the ones who can focus completely on meaningful work for extended durations.
Let me share the experiment that fundamentally shifted how I think about efficiency.
I ran a test with a sales department that was convinced they were more efficient through multitasking. We tracked their performance during a week of standard task-switching operations, then measured against it to a week where they worked on one tasks for scheduled time.
The findings were dramatic. During the focused work week, they delivered nearly 50% more productive work, with dramatically improved results and much lower fatigue levels.
But here’s the fascinating part: at the conclusion of the task-switching week, team members felt like they had been very engaged and effective. The constant activity produced the sensation of productivity even though they had accomplished far less.
This exactly demonstrates the psychological problem of multitasking: it seems busy because you’re constantly active, but the actual results decline substantially.
The cost of multitasking goes much beyond immediate time waste.
Every time you change between projects, your mind has to physically rebuild the mental context for the new task. This process consumes mental energy – the energy your mind uses for processing.
Constant task-switching genuinely exhausts your intellectual resources faster than focused work on one projects. By the end of a day filled with multitasking, you’re cognitively exhausted not because you’ve done challenging work, but because you’ve used up your mental energy on inefficient attention-shifting.
I’ve worked with executives who arrive home totally drained after periods of constant task-switching, despite accomplishing surprisingly little substantive work.
Let me say something that goes against accepted business thinking: the expectation that workers should be able to handle multiple projects concurrently is completely unrealistic.
Most role expectations specify some version of “ability to multitask” or “manage various priorities.” This is like expecting people to be able to fly – it’s physically unachievable for the typical brain to do well.
What businesses genuinely need is employees who can prioritise strategically, concentrate completely on valuable tasks, and switch between different tasks thoughtfully rather than constantly.
The highest performing organisations I work with have moved away from constant switching cultures toward deep work environments where employees can concentrate on meaningful tasks for sustained blocks.
So what does productive work management look like? How do you organise work to optimise concentration and eliminate harmful multitasking?
Batch comparable tasks together instead of scattering them throughout your time.
Instead of responding to email throughout the day, allocate defined periods for email management – perhaps morning, lunch, and end of day. Instead of handling phone calls randomly, group them into designated periods.
This method allows you to maintain substantial blocks of uninterrupted time for deep work while still handling all your administrative responsibilities.
The best effective professionals I know organise their days around maintaining concentrated thinking periods while efficiently grouping communication work.
Configure your work environment for focused work.
This means turning off interruptions during deep work periods, eliminating unnecessary applications, and creating environmental conditions that indicate to your brain that it’s time for serious work.
I advise establishing specific physical areas for different categories of work. Focused thinking happens in a concentrated environment with minimal environmental interruptions. Communication work can occur in a separate location with easier access to phones.
The companies that excel at protecting focused thinking often establish specific areas for various types of work – focused spaces for creative work, discussion spaces for group work, and communication spaces for meetings.
Recognise the distinction between responsive work and meaningful work.
The perpetual flow of “crisis” requests is one of the biggest drivers of task-switching habits. Workers switch from priority to project because they believe that everything requires immediate attention.
Learning to assess the actual urgency of requests and react appropriately rather than reactively is crucial for maintaining productive work sessions.
I help clients to develop clear processes for evaluating new tasks: genuine emergencies get instant attention, significant but non-urgent work get scheduled into appropriate blocks, and routine requests get consolidated or handled by others.
Fourth, embrace the power of being able to say no to maintain your concentration time.
This is extremely difficult for successful people who want to help everyone and take on interesting work. But constant accessibility is the destroyer of focused work.
Maintaining your capacity for important work needs conscious choices about what you will accept on.
The most productive workers I know are extremely strategic about their obligations. They recognise that excellence requires focus, and dedicated attention needs learning to say no to most tempting requests in order to say yes to the most important highest-priority ones.
Here’s what truly changed my understanding about workplace performance: the value of your work is strongly linked to the quality of your focus, not the number of activities you can handle simultaneously.
A single hour of deep, sustained work on an important priority will generate better results than eight hours of divided effort scattered across multiple tasks.
This completely opposes the widespread business culture that rewards activity over quality. But the research is overwhelming: deep work produces significantly better results than shallow multitasking.
After almost two decades of consulting with organisations improve their effectiveness, here’s what I know for sure:
Multitasking is not a strength – it’s a limitation disguised as capability.
The individuals who achieve exceptional results in the modern economy aren’t the ones who can do everything concurrently – they’re the ones who can concentrate entirely on the highest-value things for sustained periods of time.
Every strategy else is just chaotic work that creates the appearance of progress while preventing meaningful achievement.
Choose depth over multitasking. Your results rely on it.
True productivity starts when the task-switching dysfunction ends.
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