Is Multitasking Secretly Sabotaging Your Success?

Jan 09, 2024

Should you stop multitasking?

I honestly think multitasking has saved my life many times. Or maybe it has just saved me time, and in that time of my life, I craved the ability to create more time out of thin air.

I was raised in a family where being as productive as possible was highly valued. So, as a parent, I would make dinner, do the laundry, AND help with homework when needed. Or when things were super busy at the office, eat lunch and dinner at my desk while working at the computer.

So I read this articleI bookmarked this article, "Stop Multitasking. No, Really - Just Stop It."

"You may discover, as I did, that you were unwittingly addicted to not doing one thing at a time. You might even come to agree with me that restoring our capacity to live sequentially — that is, focusing on one thing after another, in turn, and enduring the confrontation with our human limitations that this inherently entails — may be among the most crucial skills for thriving in the uncertain, crisis-prone future we all face."

(oh man, it's me!)

But there have also been many times when multitasking has NOT served me when I have slipped up, missed a detail (writing "pubic" rather than "public" in a grant), or dropped the ball. So multitasking hasn't always been a hero move. Then I read this:

At work, the way to get more tasks done is to learn to let most of them wait while you focus on one. “This is the ‘secret’ of those people who ‘do so many things’ and apparently so many difficult things,” wrote the management guru Peter Drucker in his book “The Effective Executive.” “They do only one at a time.” Making a difference in one domain requires permitting yourself not

to care equally about all the others.

There will always be too much to do, no matter what you do. But the ironic upside of this seemingly dispiriting fact is that you needn’t beat yourself up for failing to do it all, nor keep pressuring yourself to find ways to get on top of it all by means of increasingly extreme multitasking.

Wanna join me - and work more to uni-task? Let's give ourselves a boost by intentionally spending the next 7 days uni-tasking and see the results!

Is Multitasking Secretly Sabotaging Your Success?

Join Our Free Trial