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There was a week last year when I was genuinely proud of how much I was handling simultaneously. Four projects. Two client threads. A strategy doc in one window and a Slack thread in another.
I told myself I was being efficient. I wasn’t. I was performing efficiency, which is a different thing entirely, and considerably more exhausting.
The output from that week was thin. Everything was half-done. Not because I lacked capability, but because the human brain does not actually run in parallel. It switches. Each switch carries a cost, a reset period, a reorientation, a small loss of depth.
Do this enough times across a day and you end up having touched many things without having thought about any of them properly.
The counterintuitive part is this: multitasking doesn’t feel costly while it’s happening. It feels productive. The sensation of busyness is almost identical to the sensation of progress.
That confusion is the real problem, not any personal failing. The environment rewards visible activity. It does not reward invisible thinking.
Multitasking doesn’t feel costly while it’s happening. That confusion is the problem, not any personal failing.
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I’ve started using a simple distinction I call the Two-Mode Test. At any moment, I’m either in execution mode-doing things that are largely mechanical, low-stakes.
I don’t require original thought-or in thinking mode, where the work requires depth, connection, and the kind of attention that switching destroys.
Execution mode can tolerate interruption. Thinking mode cannot. The mistake is treating them as the same kind of work.
The brain defaults to task-switching because presence feels safer than depth. Keeping many threads active creates the feeling of control.
Dropping into one thing fully requires a tolerance for temporary uncertainty about everything else. That is structurally uncomfortable, even when it’s the right move.
The question worth asking before starting any piece of work is a simple one: does this require my actual attention, or just my hands?
If it requires attention, protect the conditions for it. If it only requires hands, batch it with the other hand-tasks and stop treating it as thinking work.
Your ads ran overnight. Nobody was watching. Except Viktor.
One brand built 30+ landing pages through Viktor without a single developer.
Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.
That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.
That distinction, made deliberately, is more valuable than any time management technique I’ve tried. Or maybe that’s just me.
Most days will still involve switching. The goal is not purity. It is just a clearer sense of when the switching is costing something real-and choosing accordingly.
Where does your own switching happen most? Hit reply and tell me — I’m collecting these patterns and they’re more instructive than I expected.