Trying to multitask is the workplace version of spinning plates...except they all end up smashed! In my experience, multitasking is the fastest way to look busy while achieving very little. On the surface, it feels productive because you've got emails on the go, projects open and calls happening but the reality is that you're only scratching the surface of each task. I used to have five or six projects all sitting at around 30% complete. It gave me the illusion of progress but left me with very few meaningful results. The real issue with multitasking is the constant switching cost. Every time you change from one task to another, your brain has to re-orient itself. You lose rhythm and you lose quality. Instead of giving something your full attention, you end up spreading yourself so thin that nothing gets finished to the standard it could. Productivity isn't about activity, it's about completion and impact. That's what multitasking robs you of. The strategy that changed everything for me is what I call the No-Stacking Rule. It's very simple: I don't allow myself to have more than two tasks in progress at any one time. This means that if something is sitting at 30% complete, I have to finish it before I can start something new with no exceptions. Easier said than done though! It creates a discipline where I'm forced to think carefully about what I start, because once it's on my plate, I'm committed to taking it through to completion. This rule stops me from scattering my attention across multiple half-done jobs and instead drives me to deliver tangible results. A specific example: I once found myself with six different strategic projects on the go and all moving slowly and none close to completion. It felt overwhelming. When I applied the No-Stacking Rule, I cut everything back and committed to just two projects. I finished the first in three days, the second in the following week, and then moved on to the rest. Within a month, every single project was complete and signed off something that would have dragged on for months under my old approach (it used to drive me team mad!) What I learned was that focus compounds. Completing one task gives you momentum and frees up headspace. Before long, you're not drowning in half-finished work. Instead, you're creating real impact. Remember, multitasking at work is basically professional procrastination in disguise!

Multitasking is one of the most pervasive myths in modern work. We wear it like a badge of honour, but the science is clear: it's not efficiency—it's cognitive switching. Each time we move between tasks, we lose time and mental energy. Johann Hari's Stolen Focus cites research showing that it can take over 20 minutes to regain full focus after switching. Multiply that across a workday, and the cost to performance, wellbeing, and creativity is enormous. In our peak performance coaching work at Business Reimagined, we see this daily. Leaders describe being "always on," yet never feeling ahead. The problem isn't their workload—it's their state of mind. When your mind is cluttered with competing thoughts, tasks, and worries, you're not multitasking; you're fragmenting your attention. The most effective strategy I've found to maintain focus isn't time blocking or task batching—it's understanding how your mind actually works. Not emotional intelligence, not techniques, but insight. Once people grasp that their mental experience is created from the inside out—not by external pressure or circumstance—they stop trying to control everything outside them and start working from clarity inside them. In practice, that means when I feel overloaded, I don't reach for productivity hacks. I pause. I notice that my racing thoughts, not my inbox, are creating the sense of pressure. As soon as I see that clearly, my mind quiets, and focus returns naturally. This understanding isn't about managing stress—it dissolves it. We apply the same principle in our programmes. One pharmaceutical client saw dramatic results: 93% of participants reported reduced stress and overwhelm and 88% improved decision-making after learning this inside-out model of performance. When people stop fighting their thoughts and start working with a clear mind, productivity, creativity, and engagement follow—without the burnout. The takeaway? You can't out-plan an overactive mind. Productivity doesn't come from doing more; it comes from thinking less. The real advantage in the modern workplace isn't multitasking—it's mental clarity.

Multitasking harms productivity because it drains both a team's capacity and capability. When too many priorities pile up, velocity slows, quality drops, and burnout sets in — even though it looks like everything is moving forward. Skills are stretched thin, people work on tasks that aren't the best use of their talent, and morale suffers as wins become harder to see. My most effective strategy is ruthless prioritization — doing less to achieve more. It starts with clarity: defining what problem we're solving and asking, "Can the current team deliver this?" before adding anything new. In one case, we cut or paused 35% of active projects, freeing up capacity and capability for higher-ROI initiatives. As a result, over two fiscal periods, ROI across the portfolio of efforts rose by 20%, two-thirds of projects were delivered months ahead of schedule, and morale improved as the team delivered meaningful outcomes which led to higher talent retention levels.

Us humans are not wired for multitasking. Even if you are sure you are a pro at it, it might be harming your productivity and attention span in the long run. Focusing on too many things at a time increases anxiety levels and reduces your ability to enter deep focus that is crucial for tasks like brainstorming, ideation, planning, or strategy building. Long-term, it simply kills your creativity. What I do to protect my focus is separate my digital environments. It's convenient to have everything in one place, yes, but it ruins my concentration. So, for instance, I keep one browser "sacred" for deep work and research, and another for lighter tasks or entertainment like social media. Over time, the mind starts to associate the tool with the type of work you're doing: when I open my work browser and see only my work tabs and bookmarks, my brain immediately switches into serious mode. It sounds small and maybe even silly, but those mental cues reduce friction and help keep my concentration abilities in shape.

Multitasking harms productivity because it divides our attention and forces the brain to rapidly switch between tasks, a process that has been proven to drain mental energy, increases stress, and reduces the quality of our thinking. I learned this firsthand when I realized I was spending hours each year simply rewriting to-do lists, reacting to whatever was loudest or latest, and feeling perpetually busy, but not always productive. The strategy that transformed my focus was implementing the Getting Things Done(r) (GTD) methodology, which shifts the goal from time management to focus management. GTD helps externalize thoughts and commitments so the mind is free to think clearly rather than remember constantly. One of the most effective habits I adopted was the "mind sweep," taking a few minutes to capture everything that has my attention on paper and then clarifying the next specific action for each item. By organizing these actions into trusted categories ("calls," "emails," "projects," etc.), I eliminated the clutter in my head and could focus on one meaningful thing at a time. The impact has been remarkable: I sleep better, my energy is higher, and I no longer react to crises. I respond with clarity, and throughout the years, my teams have also adopted this practice, and the result is a game changer. The difference was night and day. Those of us who drank the GTD cool-aid and went through the training stopped spinning in circles, made decisions faster, and stayed accountable to what we said we would do. In a nutshell, multitasking scatters attention; having a focused and reliable system restore it. When we clear the noise and stop trying to hold things in our minds, overwhelm dissipates and creativity and strategy emerge.

Multitasking harms workplace productivity, leading to errors that can damage your personal brand. Today, it's commonplace to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as leading a Zoom call, sending a Teams message, and responding to an email. These actions make us appear "busy," but beneath the busyness are poorly thought-out arguments and disengaged employees, resulting in lower engagement and longer cycle times. A July 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that multitasking disrupts "flow states" (deep immersion) by 40%, leading to reduced task satisfaction and 15-25% more errors in complex tasks like report writing. To counter this, my personal strategy to maintain focus is straightforward but effective: when working on critical strategic imperatives for the business, I close my Teams chat, email, and silence my personal phone. By doing so, I've gained the ability to concentrate, which fosters more ideas and clearer thinking.

Multitasking isn't the villain. It's the open-ended projects and shifting urgencies that eat up more time than they deserve. I always go back to Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and his time management matrix. Four quadrants: urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important. The trap? We confuse urgency with importance, so our days get stuffed with urgent-but-not-important tasks that steal time from the real priorities. And the most dangerous ones? The important but not urgent tasks we push off until they explode into fire drills. Take ReachifyAI for example. We build AI phone services for restaurants, and a big part of our work involves adapting to telecom regulations. It's critical but rarely urgent. Deadlines can be months away, the scope is fuzzy, but it's the kind of effort that can't get shoved aside. Ignore it for too long and suddenly you're headed towards serious downtime and messaging issues. Meanwhile, urgent and important efforts like sales pushes and marketing launches keep knocking at the door. The trick is not to avoid multitasking, but to do it with intention. That starts with clearly defining where each effort sits in terms of importance and urgency. Then you build a process around it with cross-functional ownership, delegation to the right people, and everything logged in a centralized project tool. Not every project moves in a straight line, and as blockers pop up, you shift focus to the next priority. That's what effective multitasking looks like, i.e. Knowing what's on your plate, when to tackle it, and who owns what. Back to telecom as an example. We know exactly who our internal expert is, and while they wear multiple hats, they're crystal clear on their ownership and priorities. That way they can balance their time across critical projects without things slipping through the cracks. Week to week, priorities will change. The key is to stay flexible but organized. When everything's reviewed, documented, and assigned, you don't lose track and you stop mistaking "urgent" for "important."

In creative work, multitasking dilutes the quality of ideas. Concepts need space to breathe when you're building a brand's identity or reimagining a client's marketing strategy. If you're bouncing between logo sketches and a website build, neither will get the full depth of creative exploration each deserves. One way I make sure that focus is protected is by structuring our projects into creative immersion days. So instead of spreading a designer thin across five clients in a single day, we dedicate extended time to just one client. The result was not only stronger design work but also faster approvals because the concepts reflected a deeper understanding of the brand.

Multitasking has become normal, even expected, in many workplaces. You might be hired as a social media manager but soon find yourself also doing graphic design, copywriting, and more. When we try to do too much at once, even if it feels "normal," the work suffers. The biggest issue I see with multitasking is that it's easy to miss things. You overlook details, rush and hop between tasks without the mental space to go deep. You're checking notifications, hearing open office chatter, prepping for the next meeting all while trying to produce high-quality work. That's not a recipe for excellence. And that's what we should be aiming for: work that's thoughtful, well-crafted, and drives results. One strategy that helps me (and my team) stay focused is time blocking. We block specific times on our calendars for high-impact tasks and honor those blocks like meetings. As a founder, I now schedule certain days just for meetings and leave other days free for deep work. That way, I'm not bouncing between strategy calls and writing copy within the same hour. And it's made a big difference. Instead of dragging one task across three days in 30-minute chunks, I now get it done mostly in one sitting. I stay in flow. The work is better and the stress is lower. It may require a lot of thought and adjustments to implement but if more teams, whether they are corporate, startup or small businesses, made space for focus like this, I think we'd all see better outcomes.

Relevance: I have managed more than 20 people while setting the strategic vision, overseeing day-to-day operations and leading ad-hoc projects in collaboration with cross-functional teams at both start-ups and large organizations. Comment: Multitasking can harm workplace productivity when it focuses on quantity over quality. In the rush of 'getting things done', you may compromise on the quality by not giving each task enough thought, time or attention. The best way to stay focused is by clearly understanding and setting priorities, based on business objectives, revenue potential, impact and other factors that are important to you or your organization. For me, the trifecta of maintaining an efficient process, staying organized and keeping a repository of templates has been an effective strategy in mastering multitasking and delivering high-quality results. There are huge time-saving benefits that lead to more efficient use of time to accomplish multiple tasks without compromising on quality. Efficient processes: When managing multiple projects, you need to have a solid workflow for creation, approval, execution and optimization. In my experience, this has fueled better alignment, communication and collaboration between teams, while speeding up the process, overcoming obstacles and leading to higher output. It also reduced our campaign launch times from more than a week to 2 days. Staying organized: I maintained a central folder system that gave the team quick access to all documentation and resources. Instead of wasting time searching through multiple channels or asking peers, they were able to find the information they needed in one or two clicks and focus on the task at hand. It also created a central space where teams could access everything from guides and briefing documents to assets and reports in the same place for easier decision-making. Templates: Hours were being wasted in stakeholders developing briefs from scratch, causing delays in campaign executions and losing the company money. I then created templates of briefing documents that stakeholders could easily complete through fill-in-the-blank options, drop-down menus and other features. What would usually take more than 30 minutes to an hour to create, ended up taking less than 15 minutes.

Multitasking is detrimental because it deceives you into thinking you're making progress while, in actuality, you're diluting your focus. Every time you switch among tasks, you pay a cognitive cost. I have witnessed productivity decrease by as much as 30 percent on my own team with people who are trying to multitask. The result is slower progress, more mistakes, and escalation of frustration. The technique that seems to work best for me is structured batching. I schedule a two or three hour block in the morning for a deep focus on a single project or task, and then in the afternoon, I block off time for meetings, e-mails, and other "smaller" tasks. When I worked with my SEO team to develop this rhythm, we had a site migration project completed a full week ahead of the time estimated, not because we worked longer hours, but because we worked without splitting our attention among multiple tasks. An example I often use is of the team having to rewrite 120 product descriptions for one of our clients. In the past, our team would probably have spread the project out over three weeks while mixing it in with many other obligations. In the structured batching rhythm, three writers each wrote 10 polished descriptions per day and the entire project was complete in four days. Both speed and accuracy (not to mention team morale) increased with focus.

Hi, I'm Steve Morris, founder & CEO of NEWMEDIA.COM, and these are my thoughts about why multitasking is an accounting trick and a focus multiplier that our analytics have shown really doesn't work. It feels like if you multitask you get more done. But what you're really doing is rapidly context-switching. And your attentional currency is divided into smaller units. We're paying for this in reduced quality per output. The blog post we wrote about our analytics team showed the neuroscience on multitasking and productivity is precisely correct about the damage it does to attentional currency. So many people working on NEWMEDIA.COM projects find themselves ping-ponged from "Please respond to this email" to "There's a thread on Slack about this" to "Update the spreadsheet for the Coast Guard contract," and it costs us up to 40% of attentional currency, according result of pulse checks of projects we did in TTM. That's 2 days out of every 5 we give the world of ideas and productivity. One of the most counterintuitive ways I've found to waste less attentional currency is "parking notes" instead of turning to other task when some intrusive thought happens during focus time. We park them in Notion or spin up a sticky-note widget pinned to the desktop. Then you get right back to what you were doing. After we taught everyone in project management to do this, the average for focus time rose about 12%. We can even point to specific examples. For instance, we just did a series of focus blocks for the their brand rollout, where this was a strict rule. They got the project done at least a business day faster than any similar brand launch in our agency's history, and when we ran the post mortem surveys, the relief in peoples' faces and the uplift in stress-and-clarity scores were obvious. The improvement in speed and quality was so dramatic that we've adopted the note parking rule for all focus blocks now.

Multitasking doesn't save time - rather, it steals your attention. Each time you switch between tasks, there is a certain cognitive cost involved: you lose track, get back into context and are more prone to making mistakes. These little losses accumulate over a day resulting in slower delivery, more rework, and a team with less energy. My personal solution is very strict single-tasking supported by the calendar: two daily 90-minute "deep blocks" of work with the notifications turned off and a shared team rule that these are meeting-free. These blocks are sacred - no Slack pings, no half-finished Jira triage. As an illustration, when my team at Zibtek was preparing for a major platform migration, I employed this method to remain deeply involved in the architecture and decision-making process. Such concentrated time allowed us to foresee the problems early and complete the project ahead of the schedule. The team experienced the efficiency and smoothness of the process when everyone safeguarded their focus, so we incorporated it into our culture.

Multitasking doesn't just slow people down — it creates false progress. That's why I set one day a week as a strict no-call day, reinforced by a timer system: 90 minutes of deep work on one task, phones silenced, no "just five minutes" interruptions. Before, progress stalled because people were constantly interrupted by calls and emails. The team often ended up redoing work early in the morning or late at night, simply because those were the only hours when it was "legal" not to pick up the phone. Once we introduced no-call days, the difference was dramatic: during a $200M cross-border deal, contract drafts that previously dragged for days were closed in a single focused session, and we signed the agreements a week ahead of schedule. My advice: don't wait for quiet hours at dawn or midnight. Build that silence into the workday — and you'll be surprised how much faster real progress happens.

I've seen multitasking kill productivity in too many teams. I believe your brain isn't built to juggle multiple things at once. Every time you switch tasks, you lose momentum, and it can take 20+ minutes to get back in the zone. That's why I'm a big fan of the Pomodoro Technique. It's simple: work for 25 minutes straight on one thing, then take a 5-minute break. We started using this at Scry AI when our engineering team was getting pulled in ten different directions, and the results were crazy. Our developers told me they finally knocked out a backlog of reports they'd been avoiding for weeks because knowing they only had to focus for 25 minutes made it way easier to start. After a few months, we saw about 30% better on-time delivery and way less stress. The trick is that those short bursts keep your brain fresh while the breaks stop you from burning out.

The reason multitasking erodes productivity is because having scattered attention creates scattered decisions, and when every small item demands an immediate answer or action, you end up reacting on those all day instead of prioritizing the more important initiatives forward. In my own companies, what I noticed is that work isn't the most draining part of constant task switching, but the unstructured interruptions that always forced me to decide on dozens of unrelated issues without any clear context and prioritization. Now, what I did to fix it was by batching it. I group non-urgent decisions into specific review windows, like for example, finance items at one point in the week, hiring approvals at another, and client escalations at a set time each afternoon. The structure I made does two things, one, it signals to the team when they will get a thoughtful response, which reduces random interruptions, and two, it allows me to address related issues in one frame of mind, which sharpens my judgment and reduces rework on my end. Over time, this approach freed me up with long stretches of uninterrupted focus for more important work while still giving my team confidence that their operational needs would be handled consistently.

When you jump between tasks, you go a mile wide but an inch deep. Sometimes that's great (like if you're a generalist with a ton on your plate, a small team, and barely any budget), but most jobs aren't like that. You're supposed to go deep, be the specialist, and actually pull insights from the work you do. You're being paid to be an expert, but you can't give expert insights unless you take the time to really dig in, think things through, and spend time on each project. I have ADD, so I'm very familiar with "doing everything all at once". I'd sit at my desk for hours thinking I was crushing it because I was busy, but really I was just bouncing between tabs and half-finished tasks. Once I started focusing on one thing at a time, my work got so much better. I finished projects faster and came up with better ideas because my brain wasn't split in five different directions. What really helped me make that shift was a pen-and-paper checklist. I'd timeblock all my tasks but could only cross them off once they were fully done, and stopped giving myself half credit. On the first day I tried it, I looked at my list after nine hours of work and only had one thing crossed off. I was honestly kind of disappointed, but it made me realize how often I confused being busy with being productive. From then on, I focused on finishing, not just starting, and that completely changed the game. Now, I just pick one main task, put my phone on Do Not Disturb, and let myself deep dive. It's less about doing more and more about doing it better!

Multitasking decreases productivity because each transition between projects causes the brain to reset, and the resets build up very quickly. I wear many hats in my current position, including recruiting, client meetings, website changes, and building an AI product. In the beginning, I plan to switch between all four on the same mornings and saw my productivity drop, along with little mistakes starting to appear since I was not fully present in the projects. What's worked instead is time-blocking and going all-in on one focus at a time. For example, I could spend a full morning doing candidate outreach or speaking with clients, then a full afternoon on product work. By separating blocks, I have seen my productivity double. Recruiter outreach is done in half the time, client conversations are more meaningful, and the product work is much more productive without interruptions. My team has also accepted the same model. When we are all committed to a focus block, throughput and quality of work are always better.

At one point, I was Group CTO while we were running three different businesses simultaneously. I learned the hard way that multitasking is a recipe for cognitive overload. The mind goes into survival mode, optimising for the minimum effort needed to keep each task moving. A far more effective approach is to work sequentially, giving your brain the bandwidth to focus on achieving the optimal outcome for a single task. To enable this, my team and I time-block meetings, consolidating them into one or two days each week rather than letting them constantly punctuate productive time. This creates space for deep work on the remaining days. Personally, I also have a habit of writing everything down immediately to reduce mental clutter. I use Things 3 by Cultured Code to capture any incoming noise in my 'inbox', so I can process it later.

The practice of multitasking disrupts the natural flow of work. The attempt to handle campaign strategy and review analytics and respond to Slack messages creates mental delays that prevent me from making progress. The attempt to play chess while juggling oranges results in dropped items and most often these lost items are crucial. Time blocking has proven to be a lifesaving approach which protects both me and my team from distractions. My calendar contains protected focus hours which remain completely free from all interruptions and notifications. The team dedicated three consecutive mornings to writing and creative work during the critical period of our real estate client launch. The team achieved an early campaign delivery of 48 hours ahead of schedule while producing more refined content that needed fewer revisions. The ability to focus serves as a powerful tool that generates better results.