Multitasking is a lie

Multitasking is a lie. At least that’s what I’ve come to believe the more I learn about psychology.

We’ve discussed time management with multiple coaching clients this week, so I figured it was time to consolidate multiple reframes all in one place.

In this email, I’ll break down 6 concepts & practices that have been the most impactful on how I manage my time.

True multitasking is a myth

Process mapping and planning use the terms “sequential” and “parallel” to describe the order in which things happen.

• Sequential (as it sounds) means you have to finish the first task before the next one starts.

• Parallel means that both can happen at the same time.

I like to imagine our brains work much like how our hands work, they can only work on one thing at a time but “can” switch between tasks fairly easily - but that comes with a cost.

Since it’s cold in Indiana right now, Jo and I have been enjoying soup and grilled cheese recently.

• If one of us is making the whole meal it’s “best” to do it sequentially, butter the bread, grill the grilled cheese, then make soup. The has the lowest chance of something going “wrong”.

• If both of us are cooking together, we can cook in parallel; one makes the grilled cheese, and one makes the soup.

• If one of us is hungry and in a rush, we individually try to “multitask” or do both by switching between making soup and grilling the grilled cheese. But inevitably a step on the soup takes longer than expected and we burn a grilled cheese or the soup ends up cold.

In reality, what we’re trying to do is “task-switching,” not actually “multi-tasking.” And for a lot of things, this works well (enough) for it to be counted as efficient until it isn’t.

Your brain has a context-switching cost

The human brain has a metaphorical toll booth between each task/context you’re working on.

• Best-case scenario, you can just pay the toll (drop in quality, burnt toast) and go on to the next/other task.

• In reality, that toll booth usually has a traffic jam, so your brain ends up taking time to switch between tasks while you wait for the traffic.

A study by the University of California found that it takes around 23 minutes on average to get back to focusing on the original task you were working on.

Imagine if making grilled cheese was a deep-focus task. If it takes 10 mins to make grilled cheese and a similar 10 mins to make soup, done sequentially, it will take about 20 minutes to make the whole meal.

But if you switch back and forth, once to soup and once to grilled cheese, you’ve now added 46 minutes (23 mins each focus switch) of time to a 20-minute process, making dinner now over an hour-long process.

I realize this feels like a silly example, but have you ever found a “simple” Instagram post that should take 15-20 minutes routinely takes you an hour to put up?

What are you switching between in that hour?

Do you need a Maker or Manager schedule?

As you saw by my ridiculous grilled cheese example, I used the term “deep-focus”. In 2009 Paul Graham (one of the founders of Y Combinator) wrote a blog post, breaking down that depending on what you do, the structure of your calendar greatly affects your productivity.

The business world at this point operates in 30 or 60-minute chunks. Meetings are scheduled, decisions are made, and you move on based on what you have scheduled next. This is exactly how work looked like for me in corporate, the first thing I did every morning was look at my calendar of meetings each day and meeting requests in email.

This is what Paul calls a manager’s schedule.

Anything that takes creativity (or deep focus) oftentimes requires more than 60 minutes. For writers, coders, designers, and artists 60 minutes is barely enough time to get started on a task or project, and if you’re asked to switch at that point you lose all momentum and have to start over again once you come back.

It’s really common for one call on the calendar to completely throw off an afternoon or whole day for a maker because they don’t have enough time before or after a call to actually focus, so they end up just writing off the whole block of time and get frustrated about it.

If you’re a maker, the best advice is to start scheduling half or full days just to focus with no interruptions also known as a maker’s schedule. That way you’ll get WAY MORE done, and on the days you do have to “manager schedule” you’ll be able to show up without being frustrated about it.

Create before you Consume

Hot take: the easiest way to kill your own creativity is to look at what other people are doing.

In the 2000s the easiest way to make your computer run faster was to restart it, removing everything running in the background.

Every night when you go to sleep you’re effectively “restarting” your brain and starting fresh the next morning.

Place the most important & creative things first the next day before you consume (become influenced) by social media, emails, text messages, etc.

Not gonna lie, this is one of the hardest to stick to, because it’s so easy to want to scroll & consume while drinking coffee, or you have a reel going viral and you “need” to see how it’s performing first thing in the morning. But it honestly does make a difference if you can make it through your “maker” block before you consume anything and let yourself get distracted.

Do Not Disturb is your best friend in the “maker” or “creative” block of time - it’s not rude to people, you’re committing to give them your undivided attention later once you're done.

Mental notes are like browser tabs: the more you have, the worse your brain performs

Did you know you can buy a waterproof notepad to write down the ideas you have while using the objectively best brainstorming invention ever created… the shower?

The problem with mental notes is overload:

And those stats were pre-TikTok…

People talk about living in an “attention economy” because everything is actively competing for your attention. Without being careful it’s easy to get lost in all the noise and not realize what your own priorities are.

We’ve seen people try to keep everything in “mental notes”… they basically believe that they’ll remember the task, thought, or idea when it matters. And just like your favorite VHS as a kid, this works until someone (your brain) records a sports game over your favorite TMNT recording (mental note) that you’ll never see again (I didn’t watch TMNT or Sports as a kid, but I heard the cries of agony from friends when it happened).

My personal favorite solution is low-tech, the reminders & notes apps on my phone. I write enough words to remember the idea and a time to be reminded when I know I’ll have time to properly deal with it.

• At 10 pm I have an amazing marketing idea for work - it gets a reminder for 9 am the next business day because I know Jo doesn’t want to talk about it at night

• I remember that _____ birthday’s is in a couple of days - 2 reminders, one to buy a gift, and one to text them on the day

• When I finish the toothpaste - it immediately goes on the shopping list in the notes app on my phone, or it’ll never be remembered when I’m at the store

And here’s the beautiful part: by writing it down, I’m “releasing” the thought. Giving myself permission to not hold it anymore, so I’m not stressed if I forget something since everything gets “offloaded” to an in-fallible ‘memory’ device that is not my brain.

Which are glass balls vs rubber balls

Potentially, the most important thing to come to terms with is that sh*t hits the fan sometimes, and you won’t be able to get everything done.

I’ve started to believe that the most important job of an entrepreneur is setting their priorities of what gets done and what doesn’t matter because it only gets harder the more successful you get.

If you think of your life & job as juggling a bunch of things. The analogy goes that some balls are glass and they’ll shatter if you drop them, but others are made of rubber. Rubber balls just bounce when you drop them, and when you have capacity you can pick them back up and keep juggling them with no lasting consequences.

The sooner you figure out which of your balls (responsibilities) are glass, the easier it’ll be to prioritize those and be okay with dropping the rubber ones if need be since it won’t hurt them.

Have you noticed the impact of multitasking on your productivity? Hit reply and let me know what you’ve found helps your productivity.

See you next week,

Lyndon