When I sit down to work, read something online or get ready to go out, I turn into a master of losing focus. I jump from one thing to the next. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing: having a conversation, watching a reality show or getting dressed to meet friends. At work I’ve realised I don’t perform well because I’m constantly switching tasks. I often come home exhausted, convinced I’ve done a lot, only to notice an hour later that I haven’t actually solved anything. I just switched from one unfinished task to another. In the end, a fly passing by will always seem more entertaining than whatever I’m supposed to be doing. It’s tempting to believe I’ve been productive, but I haven’t. I fool myself into thinking I’m an expert in multitasking when all I’m doing is “multiprocrastinating.”
Is it the ADHD? Of course, but there is more to it.
Multitasking and attention
Multitasking is the belief that you’re doing more than one thing at the same time and giving full attention to all of them. That isn’t what actually happens. You’re simply shifting your attention back and forth, and every time you switch you have to redirect your focus. You end up making more mistakes because it’s not an effective way to manage attention. To understand why, it helps to know what attention really is.
Attention is a cognitive process that filters the endless stream of stimuli we’re exposed to. We constantly receive information that the brain needs to review and classify in order to decide what’s valuable. Valuable information is what we need to act effectively; everything else gets discarded.
Life doesn’t pause while you focus. Stimuli come in one after another without a mute button. Since we can’t close our sensory windows the way we close browser tabs, the brain uses a filtering system, our attention, to keep us from freezing. It throws away anything it considers non-essential. If it didn’t, we’d be stuck processing every noise, notification and stray thought like an overloaded server about to crash. By the way, his is why leaving phone notifications on turns every trivial update into a fake emergency, hijacking attention with the illusion of importance.
Why Your Brain Struggles To Do Two Things At Once
If you try to focus on work while listening to a podcast, what gets your attention? It depends on interest, context and the nature of the task. If you’re cleaning, a podcast doesn’t interfere much. But if you’re doing something that requires processing information, you’re forcing your brain to constantly decide what matters. When you flood your brain with podcast content, you’re using up processing capacity that should be dedicated to the task at hand. It’s like running a heavy program on your computer and opening another one on top of it. Everything slows down. Our mental RAM is limited.
Our brain is limited, more than usually thought: The “Magic 7” refers to cognitive psychologist George A. Miller’s classic idea that our working memory holds about seven pieces of information at once. Anything beyond that pushes older information out. That’s why long sequences are hard to memorise unless we break them into chunks, like when we use to learn phone numbers. It’s a fundamental limit of attention and working memory.
The Hidden Cost of Switching Tasks
On top of processing loads, every task demands concentration resources. The brain doesn’t decide what matters in two places at once. It decides on one, then on the other. When both belong to different tasks, it creates a queue and handles them in order. This is known as shifting, or alternating attention. When we think we’re doing two things at the same time, we’re just switching rapidly. Not only is this ineffective, it drains energy and increases mistakes.
Every task activates a different mental program or cognitive schema. Imagine listening to a podcast about the mating rituals of Maldivian crabs while entering invoice data into a spreadsheet. You need one mental program for invoice processing and another for crab behaviour. If you accidentally process an invoice with the crab program still running, you might end up filing a lunch with a friend under business expenses: your brain momentarily pulls information from the wrong mental “program,” so the context of the crab podcast bleeds into the context of the invoices and you classify the lunch as a work expense without even noticing.
These errors are part of the switching cost. According to the American Psychological Association, constant task switching can reduce productivity by up to 40 percent while increasing mental fatigue and error rates.
You don’t do more, you do worse
We don’t complete more tasks at once. We complete them more slowly, with less accuracy and with far more exhaustion. The brain wasn’t designed for nonstop notifications or three mental windows open at once. Each switch drains energy, steals focus and lowers quality. Multitasking doesn’t make you efficient; it turns you into a tired tightrope walker who keeps moving but never gets anywhere.
When you think you’re doing everything, remember your brain is actually running in circles, chasing its own tail. Pick one task, focus on it, finish it and then, if you still have energy, you can deal with the crab.