I Stopped Multitasking and Got More Done in Less Time
For years I believed I was good at doing several things at once. I was not. I was just doing several things badly at the same time.
Story
What actually happened
The belief that I was a skilled multitasker had been a part of how I understood myself since university in Accra, where managing coursework, a part-time job, and an active social life simultaneously had produced an identity around busyness and parallel capacity that I had carried into professional life without questioning.
By 26, working in product management, the multitasking was so embedded in my operating style that I genuinely could not read a document without having at least two other tabs open, could not attend a meeting without my laptop open for other work, and had developed such a fractured attention that I regularly found myself having to reread things I had technically already read because no version of my attention had actually completed the first reading.
The quality of my work was fine by external standards and significantly below my own capability by any honest internal assessment. A productivity workshop I attended at 27 - corporate and not especially deep in most respects - contained one specific piece of information that I could not dismiss because it came with a research base I subsequently verified: the human brain does not actually multitask.
It switches rapidly between tasks, and every switch has a cost - a return time during which the brain reorients and that is partially wasted relative to uninterrupted focus.
What I had been doing for years was not managing multiple things well but context-switching repeatedly and paying the cognitive cost of each switch while mistaking the activity for productivity.
The experiment I ran the following week was simple: I worked on one thing at a time, with other tabs closed, notifications off, for focused blocks of ninety minutes with breaks in between. The quality and volume of output in the first day was notably higher than my recent average.
Within two weeks the difference was significant enough that I extended the approach to almost all non-collaborative work. The meetings I now attend are attended fully, which means I contribute better and remember what was decided. The documents I read are read once. The work I produce has a coherence that interrupted work does not.
The hours I spend working have reduced because the hours I spend have more inside them.
The lesson
Actionable takeaway