How to Gain Focus: Make Multitasking a Thing of the Past

Photograph by Andrew Neel

Let’s face it multitasking is a myth. There I said it. The days of listing your mad multitasking guru skills on your resume, with pride, are long over. I used to feel a little bit too proud of my stellar multitasking juggling abilities. How many plates can you spin at a time? I know, I know, it sounds impressive. We are still holding on to that idea, but it’s become a dinosaur. It’s time to leave it in the past. It’s time to move forward and stop multitasking today. Are you ready?!

First of all our brains don’t actually multitask. Shocker, I know! What our brains are doing in reality is switch tasking. It’s like channel surfing. You can flip back and forth between two shows at a time, losing pieces, moments, of each show in the transition. Sure, you are grasping the story line for the most part. That doesn’t mean you aren’t losing key details and information needed to see the full picture. You are failing to engage with either. Ugh. And here we thought we were doing so well. What you have actually been doing all these years is switch tasking. We think we are good at multitasking because our brain is so amazing that it can switch between tasks as quickly as a tenth of a second. That’s really fast, but it doesn’t mean that our brain is actually doing two things simultaneously.