As I sit writing this article over the next few hours, emails will come in and message notification sounds will ring out. My colleagues will ask me questions; I’ll spontaneously recall an item on my to-do list that will just take a moment to check off. I’d be lying if I said I’ll stay entirely focused on this task for the time it takes me to complete it — but according to just about any authority on the topic of attention, I should.
At this point in the conversation around productivity, most people know that multitasking is ill-advised, nay, impossible. Numerous studies point to the entire concept being a misnomer: We don’t truly multitask; we simply switch rapidly between tasks, and each time we do, something is lost. We’re less efficient, we make more mistakes, and we’re unable to enter a state of deep engagement.
“We lack the energy to do two things at once effectively, let alone three or five,” neurologist Richard Cytowic wrote for the MIT Press Reader. “Try it, and you will do each task less well than if you had given each one your full attention and executed them sequentially.”
And yet, the practice is so ingrained in American culture as being positive (how many of you have written “ability to multitask” in the skills section of a job application?) that we just keep on doing it. To understand how we can make better productivity choices, I reached out to author and time management expert Oliver Burkeman, who publishes the bimonthly newsletter The Imperfectionist.
The Evolution of Multitasking
The first question I had was why it seemingly took us so long to figure out that multitasking is a no-no. Burkeman hypothesized that the gradual change in its status may have to do with how the workforce has shifted.
“More of us are spending more of our days doing knowledge work: thinking, writing, manipulating numbers and words on screens,” Burkeman said. “These all use a single kind of attention, and it’s clearly very difficult to focus on two different things with that kind of attention.”
He compared that type of pursuit to the jobs that dominated before the digital age. “In a more industrial setting, factory production lines and such, people tend not to have the autonomy that would provide the prospect of multitasking in the first place,” he explained. “If your job is to do one particular thing on an assembly line over and over again, there are a lot of downsides to that life, of course. But, one problem you’re not going to run into is trying to do five different things at once.”
Interestingly, while the human tendency to tackle multiple things at a time is nothing new — in a New York Times op-ed, Burkeman quotes Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1887 complaint, “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand” — the word multitask only dates to the dawn of the digital age. “Multitasking [is] from the mid-1960s meaning,” Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster, told GBH in 2021: “The concurrent performance of several jobs by a computer.”
It makes sense that as computers became known as icons of productivity, emulating them in this way would be seen as beneficial, and it also stands to reason that the more we built up multitasking as a boon to our productivity — and heralded our ability to do it — the more interested we collectively became in the science behind it. But since that science points to it not being beneficial at all, the next thing I wanted to know was how we can stop.
What Should We Do Instead?
Regardless of the evidence that trying to multitask is detrimental, many of us have jobs that require us to juggle multiple assignments at once. I asked Burkeman how we can live up to expectations without sacrificing productivity. To start with, he advises being more intentional about how your day is structured.
“If you can organize your day in such a way that there are fewer switches, if you can batch certain kinds of similar tasks together, if you can, for example, spend a couple of hours in the day where you deal with all your emails instead of flitting between email and nine other different kinds of tasks during the day, that’s going to help a lot,” he said.
But his next suggestion was slightly surprising. “There’s a case to be made for maybe learning to get a bit better at switching tasks.”
If you’re wondering, “Didn’t we just confirm that multitasking is impossible? How am I supposed to get better at it?,” same here. The key is Burkeman’s word choice. We should aim to improve our ability to “switch tasks,” not “multitask.” One way to do this is by setting endpoints.
“You can develop the habit when you launch into a new kind of task of consciously thinking, ‘What is it that I’m doing here and what will be the next sort of completion point?’ ‘I am setting out to write this slightly difficult email that I’ve been holding off from writing, and completion will be when I press send,’” he gave as an example. “It keeps you on track for a short period and provides a sort of satisfying feeling when you get to the predefined endpoint.”
RELATED: Feeling Overwhelmed at the Office? Here Are 7 Tips to Help Combat Work Stress
He added: “It’s when we are working sequentially doing one thing and letting our focus on all the other things go for a short period that we make the most rapid progress. You don’t make the most rapid progress by spreading and smearing your attention over multiple tasks.”
Consider that permission to tell your boss, “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Other Productivity Practices We Can Implement
List One Task
Burkeman has developed tons of helpful time management techniques. I asked him to share a few for this piece. First up: “List one task, do it, cross it out.”
“In some sense, the most basic productivity technique there is, is the one where you get a piece of lined paper or a notebook. You write down one thing that needs doing in your life and that you would be willing to do right now. You do it, you cross it out, and you write a new thing on the line below,” he explained, adding: “There is something incredibly powerful in being willing to choose something and act on it. And it’s much more important than whether it’s the right thing.”
He noted that the practice is particularly helpful if you’re in a rut. “You can always start incredibly small. Like maybe the only thing you’re willing to do is make yourself a cup of coffee. Maybe the only thing you’re willing to do is tidy the papers on your desk. Fine. Do that. And you will be amazed at how quickly things snowball.”
The Next Physical Action
This one is a personal favorite for getting myself going when I have a big project and feel overwhelmed at where to start.
“The technique of defining the next physical action is very powerful because, especially for us knowledge workers, it is just so easy to engage in ‘pseudo work,’” Burkeman told me. “To sort of think that by researching a topic or pondering a decision or reflecting on something that you are doing something, when what you’re really often doing is avoiding action. You’re intimidated by an action or you don’t know what to do next.”
To put the method into practice, you simply define the next concrete, physical action you can take toward your task — it may be picking up a phone and calling someone. It may be downloading a specific file. It may be creating a Google Doc.
“If you’re sufficiently in an unclear point about what to do, then actions that tiny can really help,” he said.
Treat Your To-Do Pile Like a River …
Burkeman’s technique of treating your to-do pile like a river rather than a bucket offers a particularly freeing metaphor.
“I came up with this thought originally in the context of the ‘to read’ pile,” he explained, noting it can be applied to to-do lists as well. “If you’ve got a list of a thousand articles and books that you’d like to read, don’t expect that you’ll get through them all like emptying the water out of a bucket.”
He continued: “You could relate to them instead as a river, as a flow of things that you sort of stand beside or in, and you pick out things that pass you by that seem promising, and you don’t feel bad about the fact that you let all the others flow past.”
… or a Menu
Lastly, the aforementioned analogy can be adapted another way as well, into thinking of your list like a menu of options to choose from.
“There’s a lovely transition that happens when you move from the idea of getting through a list to picking from a list,” Burkeman said. “Because firstly, you don’t rate your self-worth on the basis of whether or not you did an impossible number of tasks in a day. Secondly, you sort of get to do things instead of having to do them, right?”
RELATED: You Got This: 9 Time Management Methods to Increase Productivity and Reduce Stress
Share to:
