I’m a full-time freelancer, which means I spend my days writing articles from my house. But once upon a time, I commuted to an office every day where I was bombarded with meetings, assignments, Slack channels and project check-ins. I like to give each task my full undivided attention, so when something ripped my focus away—like a Slack DM or a coworker walking by—I felt like I got major attention whiplash.
I’d lose my flow and it’d take me a few minutes to get back in it. For a long time, I felt like something was wrong with me because I couldn’t flip between tasks like some of my coworkers who seemed gifted at doing multiple things at once. But I’ve since learned I’m not a freak (at least not in this way) and that human brains aren’t built for multitasking.
In fact, your brain can only really handle one thing at a time, so when you go through your inbox during a team meeting, you’re not really effectively doing both of these things at the same time. Instead, “your attention is switching—and if your attention is on email then you’re not paying attention to the Zoom meeting,” says Gloria Mark, PhD, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine and author of Attention Span and the Substack The Future of Attention . As a result, you’re not accomplishing as much as you think you are (and, most likely, even less than you could be if you were zeroed in on one thing).
So if you feel like you need to do it all, all the time, you might want to reth.