Multitasking Doesn’t Exist
And the smarter you are, the worse you tend to do it
I’m a focus person. I’ve been trying to live by it properly lately, with the kind of discipline that makes you briefly believe you’re a functioning adult.
Then the other day I caught myself in a meeting doing the exact opposite: half-listening, replying to emails, and checking a dashboard as if the quarterly numbers were going to whisper the meaning of life.
It felt efficient. In my head it sounded sensible: “Use the dead time,” “This will only take a minute,” “At least I’m staying on top of things.” In reality, I wasn’t multitasking. I was task switching, repeatedly. And that distinction is everything.
Your brain can’t run two demanding cognitive tasks at the same time. What it does is bounce between them. Each bounce has a cost: you have to reload context, remember what you were trying to do, re-activate the rules of the task. Classic research on task switching shows that this “gear change” adds time and increases errors, especially when the tasks are complex or rule-heavy.
And here’s the uncomfortable bit: the smarter you are, the easier it is to fall for the trap. Not because your brain is worse, but because you tend to attempt more at once, and the work you do is often more abstract, more “rules and judgement” than “press button, get result”. More switching, more context to reconstruct, more cognitive tax.
After the meeting, I looked back at what I’d done. Two emails that read strangely, a couple of numbers misread from the dashboard, and that unmistakable feeling of having been very busy without actually moving anything forward. Modern “multitasking” in a nutshell: activity without progress.
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Moral
Multitasking doesn’t exist. Fast context switching does.
Intelligence doesn’t protect you from noise. It makes you more ambitious… and therefore more fragile to fragmentation.
Conclusion
If you compare focus vs multitasking, the difference isn’t moral. It’s mechanical:
Focus: one goal active, fewer mental restarts, more depth, fewer mistakes.
“Multitasking”: competing goals, constant restarts, shallower thinking, more errors… plus a flattering illusion of productivity.
The APA’s public guidance is blunt: even small “switching costs” add up quickly when you keep bouncing between tasks, and they can noticeably cut efficiency and quality.
And when you extend this into constant digital juggling, there’s evidence (famously uncomfortable reading) that heavy media multitaskers tend to perform worse on measures of cognitive control, like filtering distraction. In other words: the more you practise hopping, the less sharp your filter becomes.
My rule now is simple: if I’m in a meeting, I’m either in the meeting or I’m not. If I’m going to check the dashboard, I do it afterwards with intention. If I’m going to answer emails, I batch them. Everything else is just performative busyness with an imaginary KPI.
Sources
Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching.
Ophir, Nass & Wagner (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers (PNAS).
American Psychological Association: Multitasking / switching costs.