You’re in a meeting. Half listening, half emailing.
Suddenly, you hear your name.
“What are your thoughts on the proposal?”
Cue panic.
If you’ve been caught multitasking, you know the sting. And if we’re being honest, most of us do it.
At work, at home, everywhere in between.
Because it feels like the only way to keep up.
But here’s the truth: multitasking doesn’t work.
It rarely helps you keep up.
In fact, it often contributes to feeling more behind.
In this week’s podcast, we dive into why.
Want to learn practical strategies to reclaim your focus and stay present for all of life (and work’s) big moments?
Tune in to this episode.
What You'll Learn:
- The hidden costs of multitasking. (Hint: it’s more than just feeling distracted.)
- Why smart, driven women are especially prone to fall into the trap.
- 2 skills to make you a champion uni-tasker
For more information, visit The Mental Offload.
So you're in one of those meetings that you sort of felt you had to show up for, just to listen in. You've got one ear on the speaker while you're trying to crank through just a few quick emails, and suddenly you hear your name with someone asking the dreaded question, "Hey, what are your thoughts about that proposal?" Can you hear that record scratch moment where you kind of stumble through like, "I didn't catch that. Can you repeat the question?" On the inside, you're cringing because you know you've just been caught out multitasking. Offloaders, that has definitely happened to me. I still cringe with embarrassment as I think about those moments. Let's face it, multitasking is rampant, but most people want to keep their multitasking under the radar. So today let's talk about multitasking, why it happens, how it robs our energy, and how we can stop, or at least reduce the amount of multitasking in our days. I'm going to give you a couple of actionable tips that you can put to use today. So let's dive in. Welcome to the Mental Offload Podcast, where we talk about women balancing work and life. It's the podcast that combines leadership, feminism, and coaching tools, so you can tackle it all with more confidence and less stress. Here's your host, Ivy League MBA, certified feminist coach, and corporate warrior, Shana Samuel. The thing is multitasking, it's so tempting, right? Especially when we have too much on our plate, which is practically everyone these days, right? It seems like the best way, maybe even the only way to get everything done is to multitask, right? I mean, I remember sitting in my office in my corporate job at writing down my to-do list, and then starting to schedule those things into my calendar, there were literally not enough hours in the workday to fit it all in. And this just happened to me this week as well. And I know I'm not alone in this because I talk to you all all the time and I hear this from almost everyone. If you've got, say, 12 hours worth of work staring you down, and you only want to be working, let's say, nine hours, what are you going to do? Well, most of us start to double book ourselves. That certainly used to be my go-to strategy. I mean, sometimes, well, frankly, a lot of times other people would double book me in meetings, but a lot of the times when that wasn't the case, I was double booking myself. I'd be like, "Oh, I'll listen in on this meeting and I'll try to do this thing over here," or, or, you know, maybe I can just listen in on that call while we're having dinner. And at home, that was definitely my go-to for managing sick days. I'd be like, "Oh, I'll just keep an eye on the kids while I work." And not only does it not work so well, it feels like crap. You're probably keenly aware, if you're doing this, that you're not giving your best to either task. And then we go into a shame spiral about how we're not giving our best to either of these tasks, right? So multitasking is what the French would call a "fos bunidé" or a "fake good idea," something that seems smart. It seems like the logical way to deal with the workload problem that we're facing. But it's actually undermining your performance. And to understand this, we have to know a little bit about what's really going on in our brains as we're multitasking. So even the term multitasking, it makes it seem like we're being efficient. We're doing two things at the same time, you know, just using our time wisely to get more done. But researchers who study this have found that what's actually happening is that our brain is doing a lot of task switching. It's going back and forth between like the ear that you're keeping on the meeting and the email that you're writing. So your brain is constantly having to switch back and forth. So we're never truly doing two things at the very same time. We're just doing lots and lots of back and forth. And that task switching, it has costs associated to it. These are sometimes called task switching costs, sometimes known as attention residue. But the basic idea is that switching between different tasks, not only is it challenging for your brain, but there's also this sort of time that it takes your brain to get focused in on the original task. So if you were writing an email and then you're trying to listen in on the call, well, it takes you a moment to get back into the call. And then it takes a few minutes again when you go back to your email to get focused back in on your email. And this happens even if you're writing an email and then you switch to like check your phone notifications, for example. On average, researchers have found that it takes about 10 minutes to refocus on that original task. So because of that attention residue, because of that time that it takes to get back into the thing that we're trying to focus on in the moment, we're typically working slower. There's more cognitive load involved. So it is harder and we're more prone to errors. So these are just a couple of the reasons why multitasking is that fake good idea. It doesn't really make us more efficient. It makes our tasks harder and it reduces our performance. One of the writers that I love on this topic, Cal Newport, who was the author of Deepwork, pointed out that if you're spending much of your day multitasking or even just say glancing regularly at your notifications or inbox, you're spending almost all of your day in a state of persistent, reduced focus. I mean, that just really blows my mind to think about. I'm going to kind of liken it to have you ever taken your car out and you punch in the gas pedal and it's just not responding like it usually does. And then, you know, after a couple of minutes, you're like, Oh, wait, the emergency break is on. That's kind of what's happening in our brains when we're multitasking. We're operating that sort of persistent state of reduced focus. So we can't go as fast. We have to hit the gas a lot harder to try to go where we need to go. It really does impact our performance and our energy. I sometimes compare it to a computer like when you're trying to run a couple of really intense programs at a time. I don't know about your computer, but my computer, it starts to overheat like that fan kicks on and it just starts going. The whole computer slows down and that's kind of like what's happening in your brain when you're multitasking. There's some interesting studies done. 43% of people are aware that this task switching multitasking makes them more fatigued and 45% in one recent study a couple years ago said it made them less productive. But stats aside, you probably know and can feel it if this is happening for you. So if you're feeling rundown or burned out and exhausted, think back to your schedule over the last 48 hours. How much multitasking have you been doing? And just allow yourself to get curious. Is multitasking truly helping you or is it starting to hurt you? Now, maybe you know some of the reasons why multitasking is not the best productivity idea. But even when we're aware that it's a bad habit, we can't seem to quit it. Why is that? And as I've thought about this topic and worked with women who are facing this, I think there are two big things that come up. One is that getting out of multitasking mode requires sometimes some hard choices. I was talking to someone the other day who's like, well, everything is important on my list. Everything is weren't or at least is urgent. I can't drop any of this, right? That's something that we will sometimes say to ourselves. And when everything is urgent, it can seem like there is no room to take things off of our plate. The other big thing that comes up for many of us is that moving away from multitasking can require some hard conversations. You might have to tell someone no or at least not right now. You might have to do some negotiation, which is or can be uncomfortable. And that other person, whether it's your boss or your kids, well, they might have some thoughts or feelings about you saying no to something. Maybe you don't want to disappoint anyone. So instead, you end up defaulting to multitasking and signing up to operate in a way that is ultimately unsustainable. So if this is you, if you're like, well, logically, I know that multitasking is not great, but I can't seem to get myself out of it. One of these things is probably at the root. And unless you deal with the underlying stuff, making the hard choices or having the hard conversations, then you're going to get stuck in this cycle where you feel backed into a corner, where you have to keep multitasking, keep feeling overstretched and feeling like crap, because you know that you're supposed to be uni-tasking, right? So I want to give you today a couple of ways to really think about the power of uni-tasking and then a couple of strategies that you can put into place to do more of this. And let's start with the first thing that I think can help a lot of people. And that's reframing what success really looks like. I think for many of us, the unchallenged assumption is that we need to deliver quantity over quality. What do I mean by that? Well, so many times we're looking at a to-do list with a lot of stuff on it. And we make success look like checking off as many of those things as possible versus doing a couple things really well. It's super important to kind of think about what your KPIs are. Now, let's keep it real. If you're getting a whole bunch of projects thrown at you by your leadership, some things are going to fall into the quantity bucket in terms of KPIs and some will fall into the quality bucket. For some things, checking it off rapidly and getting it off the list is the goal. For example, like, you probably want to respond to most if not all of your emails or in my corporate life. I remember I had this like one quarterly report that had to be filed and it was like a check the box exercise. Like it had to be done, but it didn't necessarily take a whole bunch of brain power. You might have a task like that where it's really about just powering through to get it off the list. But for other things on your list, it really is about quality. I love this analogy of like the glass balls versus the rubber balls in your life, right? We've got some stuff on our list that are rubber balls. If you drop them, they will bounce back. And we've got other things that are glass balls. If you drop them, they will break. And so when it comes to our own to-do list, we have to be clear on what's glass and what's rubber. The rubber balls, they're kind of like the quantity things. And we probably have, with the rubber balls, a lot more flexibility in terms of when and how we deliver them and at what level, then we do with the things that are glass balls. Those it's really about quality. And it's imperative that you stay focused, present, and committed to producing next level work. And I think about this not just in a work context, but at home as well. You know, we often talk about quality time being important with our kids. And when I'm honest with myself, if I think about being with them on a sick day, the reality is that seven hours of distracted time with my kids, where I'm quote unquote home with them, but I'm really focused on other stuff. There is a big difference between that and two hours of my focused attention, where I'm really listening and interacting and having a more in-depth conversation. Now, your goal doesn't have to be to be present every single moment. That's impossible. And let's face it, sometimes you got to focus on what's cooking on the hot stove or there are just chores that need to be done. But what I encourage you to do is ask the question of yourself, because sometimes we mix up the KPIs on this stuff. Like, well, I really want to be home for the seven hours, but if we're home and distracted, maybe sometimes it's better to have fewer hours of focused attention. Again, I'm using that as an example, not to say that there's a right choice here or right way to do it, but to encourage you to really investigate for yourself. Ask the question, think about what you're really trying to solve for. Is it quantity of time? Is it quality of time? Is it the quantity of tasks that you work through versus the quality of certain tasks? Because asking that question, I think, will really allow you to separate what requires your focus, what will benefit most from unit asking, and what's negotiable really on your list. So, reframing how you think about success and what your KPIs are, that's one way to kind of take a look at this. But there's another way, and this is very different, so I want you to just consider for a moment how your CEO operates, or someone in a position of power who you respect if it's not your CEO. And just imagine for a moment in a decision-making meeting, half-listening, or trying to type up an email as a not-along kind of half-attentive to the person who's presenting. Now, if you've got a good CEO or you have a really good leader in mind, you probably have trouble picturing this because you rarely see this behavior in great leaders. If they're in the room, if they are in a meeting, they're 100% focused on what's going on there, and giving their attention to it. If you even try to picture them operating in a multi-tasking, distracted way, it can be hard to picture because it's not a power move. Why is that? Well, multi-tasking really robs you of the presence part of executive presence. It's not helpful in facilitating the best decision-making, and it tends to be lower EQ behavior. So not only does it make you seem less confident, it actually makes you less competent too. So when you see great leaders in action, they're almost always unitasking. And that's because, well, number one, it makes them more effective in decision-making. And number two, they typically see themselves as having the power to set their agenda in a way that helps them operate at their best. I want to encourage you to think about yourself as having that same power. Being able to set the agenda for your work day and your home life in a way that helps you operate at your best. So let me give you two things that you can do to help hone your unitasking skills. The first one is to start to build that focus muscle. Now, focus isn't actually a muscle, but it has that quality of something that you need to build and train. So if you've got one of those deliverables where quality really matters, the top priorities, the so-called glass balls, you can try putting yourself in focus mode, a couple of things that you can do that will really help manage your attention and lengthen your attention span. You can silence notifications on your phone or your computer as well if you're getting email notifications. Try working in small sprints at first 20 minutes. So this is the classic Pomodoro technique if you've heard of that. So you set a timer for 20 minutes, fully focus on your task, and when the timer's up, then you can go on to something else and really kind of trains you to sit with a single task for a short sprint of time. And over time, I recommend you can dial that up to 60 minutes as you've trained yourself to be focused and attentive on a single task. But the key here is to really practice giving your full attention to the task at hand to the one task at hand, I should say, even if it's only for 10 minutes at a time. If you do nothing else, that's going to help train you to work focused and unit ask, and you're going to see the benefits immediately. The second thing that you can do that's super important, you know, we talked about some of the underlying things that get in the way of unit asking. So it's important to negotiate your priorities, even when the conversations feel uncomfortable or difficult. So maintain a discipline starting with yourself of looking at your tasks, prioritizing, sometimes ruthlessly, and being willing to bump the things that don't make the cut. I did that this week. I wrote down all my tasks and I was like, oh, this doesn't all fit into the time I have available. And yet, what do I bump? So making those sometimes difficult prioritization decisions for yourself first is key. So at the start, this might look like bumping a project back by a day. You thought you'd deliver it on Wednesday, you end up delivering it on Thursday instead. But later on, as you kind of build that skill of identifying and negotiating your priorities first with yourself, then you can start negotiating them with other people. So this might mean proactively talking to your boss about deadlines so that you aren't left feeling overstretched. So first, we're starting by leading yourself so that you can lead your time and eventually lead upwards in a way that gets you the buy-in that you need. So I get the multitasking is so tempting, especially given the amount of stuff that's on most of our plates. But when you see how much it ultimately slows you down and steals from your presence as a leader, both at work and at home, it's not super attractive. Ultimately, I want every woman in leadership to believe that you have the power to set your agenda. Because when you have that sense, you'll find yourself rejecting the myth of multitasking much easier. And when you do reduce multitasking, you'll find that you have improved your focus, your energy levels, and your performance. And that's what it looks like to lead with that quiet, relaxed confidence of a true leader. So this week, I hope you go out there and unitask away. Talk to you next week. Are you ready to step into a life for success at work and success at home? Go hand in hand. Then it's time for the mental off-ludes, shut down ritual. It's a cruising, practical method to help you log off and work behind. You can owe your evenings and be present to people you love. And the shut down ritual makes it easy. Being the power to truly walk away from work, and be present with the people who matter most to you. It's just what you need if you want to achieve big things in the world without losing your mind. Ready to reclaim your time and your peace of mind? Go to www.thementaloffload.com/shutdown and get your free download of the shutdown ritual. That's www.thementaloffload.com/shutdown. And join me next week for the next episode of the mental offload podcast.
