How to Stop Losing Time to the Myth of Multitasking
By: Matthew A. Overlund
Tags: Focus, Mindfulness, Multitasking, Productivity, Leadership

Multitasking is killing your productivity and performance and may even be damaging to your professional relationships with other people.

I can hear you now:

Here we go again, someone else telling me to I shouldn’t be answering emails during meetings.



Yes, that’s what I’m going to tell you.

I’m also going to give you some new perspective as to why you should listen and consider a change in behavior.

You might have a problem with multitasking if:

You started to answer an email while talking on a call and promptly lost your train of thought on both tasks. (I’ve done this.)

You began to read and respond to a notification in the middle of a presentation because your phone or smartwatch alerted you to its arrival — the problem is you were the speaker. (I’ve done this one too.)

You type, text, and talk at the same time all day, every day. You are a multitasking savant and exempt from all rules, studies, or opinions about how multitasking isn’t productive. (Not me! Okay, this used to be me, but I’ve come around, and I hope you will too.)

Not all types of tasks are created equal

There are some specific instances where multitasking can be productive. Work that doesn’t require a high degree of focus can be executed almost without thought. We are then free to give the majority of our attention to tasks more deserving of it.

Consider how we talk and prepare dinner, listen to a meeting while taking notes, eat and read, or listen to music and do just about anything else.

In her 2010 article for Science Magazine, Gisela Telis explained:

“When the brain tries to do two things at once, it divides and conquers, dedicating one-half of our gray matter to each task, new research shows. But forget about adding another mentally taxing task: The work also reveals that the brain can’t effectively handle more than two complex, related activities at once.”

In every case where we can pull this off successfully, there is a primary task and a secondary task.

If you look closer, you’ll probably notice that all the secondary functions require less attention.

They are generally things you have entirely mastered both mentally and physically. They aren’t mentally taxing. You are literally on auto-pilot as you execute those tasks, while your primary focus is on other things.

So, how is this a problem?

We’ve internalized the execution of those secondary tasks by repetition and improvement over time. If we do think about them at all, we are likely to dismiss them as something simple: not worth our attention.

From there, we start thinking about other things of similar apparent complexity. But here we begin to blur the definitions between easy and small, quick, or repetitive tasks.

You know, things like notifications.

Dear Smartphone, please stop with the reminders

How did we fall into this notification driven trap of obsession with instant awareness of all things in the first place?

We are inundated by psychological engineering that is explicitly trying to build habitual behaviors and relationships between us and our phones. There’s an app for everything, and they all send notifications.

While unethical developers can abuse this, it’s not inherently wrong — the intention is to be helpful. Notifications, when used well, are about providing us vital information at the time we are most likely to need it.

Our problem is that we don’t tend to regulate ourselves well enough to ensure these notifications are serving their purpose.

We let them run rampant and start running our lives. We may even think we have a good reason for that.

In his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal applies the “5 Whys” concept to understand one possible need for real-time notifications:

“Why #1: Why would Julie want to use email? Answer: So she can send and receive messages. Why #2: Why would she want to do that? Answer: Because she wants to share and receive information quickly. Why #3: Why does she want to do that? Answer: To know what’s going on in the lives of her coworkers, friends, and family. Why #4: Why does she need to know that? Answer: To know if someone needs her. Why #5: Why would she care about that? Answer: She fears to be out of the loop.”

Julie’s psychological triggers aside, we can probably all empathize with her actions. We all have our reasons for why those notifications are important to us.

First, the notifications we receive seem simple, and the frequency of repetition breeds familiarity.

How many hundreds of times a day do you hear that ping vibration alerting you to another email, text message, social media post that needs your attention?

Those are small things. Small things are easy, and easy things fit in my secondary multitasking work queue!

Not so fast.

Recall that what we can’t do well without shifting our attention, and paying the associated cost for doing so is taking on a second task that is mentally taxing.

Those notifications themselves might be small. The problem is they aren’t tasks you can complete without pulling at least some of your focus away from your primary activity.

They are familiar, so we tell ourselves they are easy to process quickly.

Is that true?

Even scanning and deleting newsletters and junk mail from your inbox requires some shift in focus, some allocation of attention, no matter how small.

The critical element we often overlook is that those notifications are representative of some form of communication.

Have you ever tried to follow two conversations at the same time? It doesn’t often work out well.

You may take this beyond notifications and small, seemingly mindless tasks like email, and try to complete work with more substance.

Based on my past behavior, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

I’m going to assume you are only doing this when the competing task doesn’t require much of your attention anyway. A meeting you probably should have declined, but chose to accept.

The problem is that when we show up, but don’t actually show up, invariably someone will ask for our input. We are unprepared as our mind was elsewhere, focused on our secondary task.

What happens then?

Our work on both tasks comes to a halt, as we scramble to get our bearings and focus on the new priority.

The meeting gets an unplanned follow up to discuss some critical pieces of information that we couldn’t produce in our distracted state.

The secondary task you worked on is still incomplete.

Worse yet, you may have been able to finish the work, but it lacks your usual attention to detail, almost as if you were interrupted while working on it.

What a coincidence, right?

There is a problem with trying to multitask in these scenarios.

Unlike the notifications and quick scans of email, we can’t justify to ourselves that these other types of tasks don’t need our full attention.

We know both tasks deserve our full attention, but we convince ourselves that we can effectively slice up the time —

That we can shift our focus quickly from one job to the other.

What this overlooks, however, is the context switch.

The Context What?

Context switching is a concept borrowed from computing.

It describes how one component can work on different tasks if the necessary resources related to each task can be prepared and made available at the right time.

An easy way to relate it is to consider that we have a factory that produces widgets. Our widget business sells several different products, and the same machinery and staff create each of those products.

The catch is that each product requires different setup on the machines, and various source materials for the construction.

Let’s assume that we deal with this by batching the work. Each day we run different shifts dedicated to producing the necessary volume of each widget, but there’s some overhead involved.

Each time we have to change our production line to start building a different type of widget, we have to reconfigure the machinery. We also need to prepare all the source materials for the next production run.

Those efforts to reconfigure our factory are the context shift.

We lose productive time in our factory while we shift our resources from doing one thing, to doing something else.

The same loss of productivity happens in our brain when we try to quickly move back and forth between the execution of two non-trivial tasks.

According to a 2012 article in Psychology Today, people who jump from one task to the next are up to 40% less productive and incur a cognitive penalty as well.

So, in addition to losing small slices of time while your brain moves from one task to the other, you’re also not doing your best work.

We give driving our full attention because we recognize the need to focus our attention, reaction, and motor skills entirely on the task at hand. While our work may not be life and death, as inattentive driving often is, doesn’t it still deserve our full attention?

There are other benefits as well, aside from just the quality of work.

Consider the impact on your team or other coworkers.

Whether we want to admit or not, our quasi-attention is noticeable.

How often have you noticed someone you work with that’s not quite engaged or fully connected to a conversation? They can see that in your behavior and performance as well. We are not as good at hiding things as we think we are.

Do More by Doing Less

So how can we break these habits, and solve these problems?

First, we need to realize that focus and prioritization will always produce our best work, in less time.

Your complete attention for one hour is infinitely more valuable than half your focus spent on the same task for 30 minutes.

Take it a step further: challenge yourself to complete the tasks at hand faster, without compromising the quality of output. When you commit your full focus to one task, often, this is achievable.

Once you are committed to abandoning multitasking for good, there are some key actions you take to help you along.

Research and adopt a system of prioritization that works for you. Your goal here is to take a more intentional approach where we work on what matters — or, as Dr. Stephen Covey said, “putting first things first.” (fn)

Work from your prioritized list to establish goals for each day. Use the list of goals to define focused, dedicated work sessions where you commit to doing your best work for the time required for completion.

Take active steps to minimize distractions that would otherwise steal your focus. Separating yourself from your devices and liberal use of Do Not Disturb will help here.

Decline meetings or events where your attendance adds no value or is not otherwise required. Doing so will reduce pressure on you to work on other things during these meetings to “make up for the lost time.”

A pre-requisite to this will be that meeting invitations have a clear agenda. Don’t hesitate to ask for one from the sender if they don’t provide it.

A pre-requisite to this will be that meeting invitations have a clear agenda. Don’t hesitate to ask for one from the sender if they don’t provide it. Block time in your schedule to deal with distractions (and the associated notifications) in chunks. Rather than allowing email to interrupt your focus, shut it down. Leave it for your next scheduled block of time where you can give that task your full focus and attention.

task your full focus and attention. Encourage your peers, employees, and yes, even your manager to do the same. If you show up, fully present and focused on the task or discussion at hand, it’s reasonable to ask those around you to do the same.

Focusing on one thing at a time, to the best of your ability, will ensure you are bringing your full focus, creativity, and capability to every task or interaction.