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Research is clear that multitasking significantly undermines career progress despite its popularity in modern workplaces. But why does multitasking harm workplace productivity? And how can you maintain concentration to get more accomplished? Below, experts share proven strategies that replace multitasking habits with intentional productivity systems to improve focus and work quality. No-Stacking Rule Drives Meaningful Project Completion Trying to multitask is the workplace version of spinning plates . . . except they all end up smashed! In my experience, multitasking is the fastest way to look busy while achieving very little. On the surface, it feels productive because you’ve got emails on the go, projects open, and calls happening, but the reality is that you’re only scratching the surface of each task. I used to have five or six projects all sitting at around 30% complete. It gave me the illusion of progress but left me with very few meaningful results. The real issue with multitasking is the constant switching cost. Every time you change from one task to another, your brain has to reorient itself. You lose rhythm and you lose quality. Instead of giving something your full attention, you end up spreading yourself so thin that nothing gets finished to the standard it could. Productivity isn’t about activity, it’s about completion and impact. That’s what multitasking robs you of. The strategy that changed everything for me is what I call the No-Stacking Rule. It’s very simple: I don’t allow myself to have more than two tasks in progress at any one time. This means that if something is sitting at 30% complete, I have to finish it before I can start something new with no exceptions. Easier said than done though! It creates a discipline where I’m forced to think carefully about what I start, because once it’s on my plate, I’m committed to taking it through to completion. This rule stops me from scattering my attention across multiple half-done jobs and instead drives me to deliver tangible results. A specific example: I once found myself with six different strategic projects on the go and all moving slowly and none close to completion. It felt overwhelming. When I applied the No-Stacking Rule, I cut everything back and committed to just two projects. I finished the first in three days, the second in the following week, and then moved on to the rest. Within a month, every single project was complete and signed offsomething that would have dragged on for months under my old approach (it used to drive my team mad!) What I learned was that focus compounds. Completing one task gives you momentum and frees up headspace. Before long, you’re not drowning in half-finished work. Instead, you’re creating real impact. Remember, multitasking at work is basically professional procrastination in disguise! Sean McPheat, Founder & CEO, MTD Training Mental Clarity Outperforms Productivity Hacks Multitasking is one of the most pervasive myths in modern work. We wear it like a badge of honor, but the science is clear: it’s not efficiencyit’s cognitive switching. Each time we move between tasks, we lose time and mental energy. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus cites research showing that it can take over 20 minutes to regain full focus after switching. Multiply that across a workday, and the cost to performance, well-being, and creativity is enormous. In our peak performance coaching work, we see this daily. Leaders describe being “always on,” yet never feeling ahead. The problem isn’t their workload it’s their state of mind. When your mind is cluttered with competing thoughts, tasks, and worries, you’re not multitasking; you’re fragmenting your attention. The most effective strategy I’ve found to maintain focus isn’t time blocking or task batchingit’s understanding how your mind actually works. Not emotional intelligence, not techniques, but insight. Once people grasp that their mental experience is created from the inside outnot by external pressure or circumstancethey stop trying to control everything outside them and start working from clarity inside them. In practice, that means when I feel overloaded, I don’t reach for productivity hacks. I pause. I notice that my racing thoughts, not my inbox, are creating the sense of pressure. As soon as I see that clearly, my mind quiets, and focus returns naturally. This understanding isn’t about managing stressit dissolves it. We apply the same principle in our programs. One pharmaceutical client saw dramatic results: 93% of participants reported reduced stress and overwhelm and 88% improved decision-making after learning this inside-out model of performance. When people stop fighting their thoughts and start working with a clear mind, productivity, creativity, and engagement followwithout the burnout. The takeaway? You can’t out-plan an overactive mind. Productivity doesn’t come from doing more; it comes from thinking less. The real advantage in the modern workplace isn’t multitaskingit’s mental clarity. Kay Tear, Managing Director, Business Reimagined Ltd Ruthless Prioritization Delivers Higher ROI Results Multitasking harms productivity because it drains both a team’s capacity and capability. When too many priorities pile up, velocity slows, quality drops, and burnout sets ineven though it looks like everything is moving forward. Skills are stretched thin, people work on tasks that aren’t the best use of their talent, and morale suffers as wins become harder to see. My most effective strategy is ruthless prioritizationdoing less to achieve more. It starts with clarity: defining what problem we’re solving and asking, “Can the current team deliver this?” before adding anything new. In one case, we cut or paused 35% of active projects, freeing up capacity and capability for higher-ROI initiatives. As a result, over two fiscal periods, ROI across the portfolio of efforts rose by 20%, two-thirds of projects were delivered months ahead of schedule, and morale improved as the team delivered meaningful outcomes, which led to higher talent retention levels. Rohit Bassi, Founder & CEO, People Quotient GTD Method Transforms Focus Not Time Multitasking harms productivity because it divides our attention and forces the brain to rapidly switch between tasks, a process that has been proven to drain mental energy, increase stress, and reduce the quality of our thinking. I learned this firsthand when I realized I was spending hours each year simply rewriting to-do lists, reacting to whatever was loudest or latest, and feeling perpetually busy, but not always productive. The strategy that transformed my focus was implementing the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, which shifts the goal from time management to focus management. GTD helps externalize thoughts and commitments so the mind is free to thnk clearly rather than constantly remember. One of the most effective habits I adopted was the “mind sweep,” taking a few minutes to capture everything that has my attention on paper and then clarifying the next specific action for each item. By organizing these actions into trusted categories (“calls,” “emails,” “projects,” etc.), I eliminated the clutter in my head and could focus on one meaningful thing at a time. The impact has been remarkable: I sleep better, my energy is higher, and I no longer react to crises. I respond with clarity, and throughout the years, my teams have also adopted this practice, and the result is a game changer. The difference was night and day. Those of us who drank the GTD Kool-Aid and went through the training stopped spinning in circles, made decisions faster, and stayed accountable to what we said we would do. In a nutshell, multitasking scatters attention; having a focused and reliable system restores it. When we clear the noise and stop trying to hold things in our minds, overwhelm dissipates and creativity and strategy emerge. Judy Goldberg, Founder, Wondershift Separate Digital Environments Enhance Mental Focus We humans are not wired for multitasking. Even if you are sure you are a pro at it, it might be harming your productivity and attention span in the long run. Focusing on too many things at a time increases anxiety levels and reduces your ability to enter deep focus that is crucial for tasks like brainstorming, ideation, planning, or strategy building. Long-term, it simply kills your creativity. What I do to protect my focus is separate my digital environments. It’s convenient to have everything in one place, yes, but it ruins my concentration. So, for instance, I keep one browser “sacred” for deep work and research, and another for lighter tasks or entertainment like social media. Over time, the mind starts to associate the tool with the type of work you’re doing: when I open my work browser and see only my work tabs and bookmarks, my brain immediately switches into serious mode. It sounds small and maybe even silly, but those mental cues reduce friction and help keep my concentration abilities in shape. Jan Hendrik Von Ahlen, Managing Director & Co-founder, Career Coach, JobLeads Multitasking Disrupts Critical Flow States Multitasking harms workplace productivity, leading to errors that can damage your personal brand. Today, it’s commonplace to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as leading a Zoom call, sending a Teams message, and responding to an email. These actions make us appear “busy,” but beneath the busyness are poorly thought-out arguments and disengaged employees, resulting in lower engagement and longer cycle times. A July 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that multitasking disrupts “flow states” (deep immersion) by 40%, leading to reduced task satisfaction and 1525% more errors in complex tasks like report writing. To counter this, my personal strategy to maintain focus is straightforward but effective: when working on critical strategic imperatives for the business, I close my Teams chat and email and silence my personal phone. By doing so, I’ve gained the ability to concentrate, which fosters more ideas and clearer thinking. Andrew Lee, HR Director, Raytheon Multitask With Intention Through Priority Management Multitasking isn’t the villain. It’s the open-ended projects and shifting urgencies that eat up more time than they deserve. I always go back to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and his time management matrix. Four quadrants: urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important. The trap? We confuse urgency with importance, so our days get stuffed with urgent-but-not-important tasks that steal time from the real priorities. And the most dangerous ones? The important but not urgent tasks we push off until they explode into fire drills. We build AI phone services for restaurants, and a big part of our work involves adapting to telecom regulations. It’s critical but rarely urgent. Deadlines can be months away, the scope is fuzzy, but it’s the kind of effort that can’t get shoved aside. Ignore it for too long and suddenly you’re headed towards serious downtime and messaging issues. Meanwhile, urgent and important efforts like sales pushes and marketing launches keep knocking at the door. The trick is not to avoid multitasking, but to do it with intention. That starts with clearly defining where each effort sits in terms of importance and urgency. Then you build a process around it with cross-functional ownership, delegation to the right people, and everything logged in a centralized project tool. Not every project moves in a straight line, and as blockers pop up, you shift focus to the next priority. That’s what effective multitasking looks like, i.e., knowing what’s on your plate, when to tackle it, and who owns what. Back to telecom as an example. We know exactly who our internal expert is, and while they wear multiple hats, they’re crystal clear on their ownership and priorities. That way they can balance their time across critical projects without things slipping through the cracks. Week to week, priorities will change. The key is to stay flexible but organized. When everything’s reviewed, documented, and assigned, you don’t lose track and you stop mistaking “urgent” for “important.” Zeel Jadia, CEO, ReachifyAI Creative Immersion Days Protect Quality Work In creative work, multitasking dilutes the quality of ideas. Concepts need space to breathe when you’re building a brand’s identity or reimagining a client’s marketing strategy. If you’re bouncing between logo sketches and a website build, neither will get the full depth of creative exploration each deserves. One way I make sure that focus is protected is by structuring our projects into creative immersion days. So instead of spreading a designer thin across five clients in a single day, we dedicate extended time to just one client. The result was not only stronger design work but also faster approvals because the concepts reflected a deeper understanding of the brand. Adrienne Folse, Founder, Design the Planet Time Blocking Transforms Task Completion Quality Multitasking has become normal, even expected, in many workplaces. You might be hired as a social media manager ut soon find yourself also doing graphic design, copywriting, and more. When we try to do too much at once, even if it feels “normal,” the work suffers. The biggest issue I see with multitasking is that it’s easy to miss things. You overlook details, rush, and hop between tasks without the mental space to go deep. You’re checking notifications, hearing open office chatter, and prepping for the next meeting all while trying to produce high-quality work. That’s not a recipe for excellence. And that’s what we should be aiming for: work that’s thoughtful, well-crafted, and drives results. One strategy that helps me (and my team) stay focused is time blocking. We block specific times on our calendars for high-impact tasks and honor those blocks like meetings. As a founder, I now schedule certain days just for meetings and leave other days free for deep work. That way, I’m not bouncing between strategy calls and writing copy within the same hour. And it’s made a big difference. Instead of dragging one task across three days in 30-minute chunks, I now get it done mostly in one sitting. I stay in flow. The work is better and the stress is lower. It may require a lot of thought and adjustments to implement but if more teams, whether they are corporate, startup, or small businesses, made space for focus like this, I think we’d all see better outcomes. Remi Roy Osi, Founder, PodGround Efficient Processes Master Multiple Tasks Successfully Multitasking can harm workplace productivity when it focuses on quantity over quality. In the rush of “getting things done,” you may compromise on quality by not giving each task enough thought, time, or attention. The best way to stay focused is by clearly understanding and setting priorities, based on business objectives, revenue potential, impact, and other factors that are important to you or your organization. For me, the trifecta of maintaining an efficient process, staying organized, and keeping a repository of templates has been an effective strategy in mastering multitasking and delivering high-quality results. There are huge time-saving benefits that lead to more efficient use of time to accomplish multiple tasks without compromising on quality. Efficient processes: When managing multiple projects, you need to have a solid workflow for creation, approval, execution, and optimization. In my experience, this has fueled better alignment, communication, and collaboration between teams, while speeding up the process, overcoming obstacles, and leading to higher output. It also reduced our campaign launch times from more than a week to two days. Staying organized: I maintained a central folder system that gave the team quick access to all documentation and resources. Instead of wasting time searching through multiple channels or asking peers, they were able to find the information they needed in one or two clicks and focus on the task at hand. It also created a central space where teams could access everything from guides and briefing documents to assets and reports in the same place for easier decision-making. Templates: Hours were being wasted as stakeholders developed briefs from scratch, causing delays in campaign executions and losing the company money. I then created templates of briefing documents that stakeholders could easily complete through fill-in-the-blank options, drop-down menus, and other features. What would usually take more than 30 minutes to an hour to create ended up taking less than 15 minutes. Sidra Tariq, Owner, Curio Solutions Hub
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E-Commerce
Few objects embody the endurance of the human spirit better than a medal. This Sunday, when the projected 55,000 breathless souls cross the finishing line of the annual TCS New York City marathon, they will be receive a one-of-a-kind medal to remember this achievement. The NYC marathon medal looks different every year. While many previous versions have attempted to etch the experience onto metal, the 2025 medal takes an even more tangible approach. At first glance, the surface of the new medal appears to be brushed with an array of diagonal stripes. But flip it on its side, and you will notice that the stripes are ribbed, and they reflect the actual elevation of the five-borough course. The brutal start up the Verrazzano Bridge; the seemingly endless 5th Avenue incline, the rolling hills of Central Parkthese topographies can be felt (or re-felt) at the glide of a finger. [Photo: courtesy NYRR] The medal is an exquisite piece of design that celebrates the experience of running a marathon through touch. And it has been so popular since it was unveiled that it has even placated the prickliest of armchair critics. “In the 10 years I’ve been at this company, it’s the best reaction we’ve ever seen,” says Thomas Cabus, the creative director at nonprofit New York Road Runners, who designed this year’s medal. “All of them are positive, which is rare.” Finishers medals lined up at the 2015 marathon. [Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images] “Can we jazz it up a bit?” The TCS NYC marathon medal archive, on display at the NYRR Run Center, shows how wildly the design of marathon medals has been over the years. The 2005 medal showed a crowd of runners huddled against the Verrazzano Bridge. The 2018 medal was shaped like an apple. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Raman Oberoi (@ramanjitoberoi_georgian) But some things never change: the TCS logo has to feature; the five boroughs have to be listed (in this case on the back of the medal) and there has to be room for willing finishers to get their initials engraved. Each medal also features braille lettering on the back. Since NYRR rebranded in 2023courtesy of brand consultancy Chermayeff & Geismar & Havivthe medal designers also have to include a variation of the new motif, namely diagonal stripes to symbolize the five boroughs coming together on marathon day. [Photo: courtesy NYRR] The idea for the 2025 medal was born while the team was experimenting with those diagonal stripes. “The idea was, can we jazz it up a little bit?” recalls Keziah Makoundou, lead designer at NYRR, who codesigned the medal alongside Cabus. Once the idea materialized, the team took an official graphic of the course and extruded that to a three-dimensional shape. The elevation map was born. [Photo: courtesy NYRR] Designing a time capsule Since the medal was unveiled in early October, it has been so popular that some runners who were planning on deferring are now considering walking the marathon just to get it. Others have called for this medal to become the signature medal of the TCS NYC marathon. But what makes each medal so special is precisely the fact that it acts as a time capsule from a particular race. Tomasz Sablinski, a 69-year-old running aficionado who splits his time between New York City and New Jersey, has run over 80 marathons across North America and Europe. This year’s five-borough race will be his 12th. “I must have over 100 medals,” he told me in an email. “And with so many of them, it’s fun when a medal stands out from the others because of its unusual design, or if it’s specifically related to the course it’s from.” Sablinski is particularly fond of some of his wooden medals, but he loves this year’s design for the NYC marathon medal because it is so directly tied to the course. “You won’t be able to look at this year’s medal without recalling the elevation of the bridges around the boroughs,” he says. When Sablinski crosses the finishing line on November 2, Cabus and Makoundou will be there to watch his and the reaction of 55,000 others when they receive their well-earned medal. And with so much positive feedback already, they feel both proud and pressured to top themselves next year. “Runners are very difficult people to please, so it’s like a challenge,” says Makoundou, before adding with a chuckle: “I don’t know what we’re going to do next year.”
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E-Commerce
Bill Gates has invested billions over the last two decades to help fight climate change. But in a new blog post, he argues that world is too focused on cutting short-term emissions. “The doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals,” he writes, calling for a “strategic pivot” to focus on “improving lives” by focusing development dollars more on agriculture and disease and poverty eradication. The logic is flawed, and built on a series of false trade-offs that ignore how interconnected climate and development goals are. Gates criticizes the “doomsday” view that climate change will “decimate civilization” in a few decades and writes that “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Because of the progress already made on climateand since humanity will survivehe argues we should now be more focused on alleviating human suffering rather than continuing to so intently focus on rising temperatures. But climate scientists do not argue that civilization itself will end. Instead, they say, hurricanes, heat waves, and other climate disasters are already killing people, destroying homes and infrastructure, making it harder to grow food, and making life more difficult and expensive in other ways. The longer we wait to cut emissions, the worse those problems will continue to get, and the harder it will be to adapt. Human suffering is directly linked to whether or not emissions are curbed now. Gatess essay uses really false framing that pits improving peoples lives against science-based temperature and emissions goals that are intrinsically connected, says Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. If you look around the world right now, climate change is directly undermining human development goals, poverty eradication, and health goals. You just have to look at the disruption from the climate-supercharged Hurricane Melissa to see an example of that. A report this week from the medical journal the Lancet explains that the impacts of climate change are creating an unprecedented threat to the health and survival of people globally, with millions already dying unnecessarily each year. That threat keeps growing. With higher temperatures and more rain, mosquitoes can thrive in new areas, increasing malaria risk, for example. These are all directly connected, Cleetus says. You can’t solve these complex development and health challenges if you ignore climate change. Gates argues that temperature goals are getting in the way of focusing on improving global poverty. But the most ambitious temperature goal in the Paris climate agreementto limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsiuscame from poor island nations who saw that sea level rise would hit them first. “Bill Gates has the audacity as a billionaire to say, ‘Well, climate people don’t care about the poor and the developing world,’ when it’s like, dude, the temperature stabilization framework in many ways came from the poor and the developing world,” says Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. “Why do we have the 1.5 degree target? Because these least-developed countries, small island nations, banded together to say, ‘This is what we want.’ It wasn’t the big rich countries pushing that.” Having the temperature goal was critical, and a follow-up report from the IPCC talking about how much emissions would need to fall by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. “That’s a timeline that policymakers can actually wrap their heads around,” Stokes says. It led to Biden’s ambitious climate policy in the U.S., and though Trump has reversed that, it also spurred states, other countries, and companies to set short-term goals. Gates suggests that we shouldnt cut funding for health and development to fight climate change. But thats a straw man argument. When the Trump administration slashed spending on international health, it didnt move that money to climate programs. Globally, the funding comes from different sources. Its not the same money, says Jigar Shah, co-managing director for Multiplier, a cleantech consulting firm, who previously ran the loan programs office at the Department of Energy. USAID is not spending money on clean energy. The money for clean energy is coming from the private sector, and most of this stuff is now so cost-effective and so profitable, its not even coming from blended finance. Its coming from pure private sector dollars. Gates argues that communities can adapt to short-term climate impacts, and that economic growth will help avoid more deaths from climate changeif more people can afford air conditioners, for example, that will save lives. But that overlooks the limits of economic growth and resilience in the face of repeated disasters. Theres no way for economies to grow when theyre getting slammed again and again by climate-fueled disasters, Cleetus says. The essay also suggests that economic growth in developing countries is at odds with climate policy. Theres not a single person in the world thats making that argument, says Shah. None of the poor countries have ever been required to reduce their emissions. At the same time, as renewables have become the cheapest source of electricity, developing countries can affordably build out energy access without steeply increasing emissions. Pakistan, for instance, imported the third most solar panels of any country in the world in 2024. The entire solar revolution of the last three years in Pakistan was done with private sector capital and DIY videos on WhatsApp, Shah says. Gates seems to suggest that it’s fine to wait to cut emissions further, because better technology (much of which is being supported with his investments) is on the horizon. But since climate change is a cumulative problem, waiting another decade to cut emissions means that we could easily pass critical tipping points. That’s the biggest contradiction in his argument: If he wants to protect lives and livelihoods, cutting emissions does need to happen now. “What the science is showing is within the next decade, if we don’t sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions, there’s a real potential to blow right past the various agreement climate goals,” Cleetus says. “That can unlock feedback loops in the earth system that we cannot turn back even if we reduce emissions in the future.” Gates urges world leaders at COP 30, this year’s global climate conference, to “prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare,” rather than centering emissions cuts. The ideas are probably unlikely to have much of an impact on what actually happens at the conference. But the messaging is bad for climate action globally. “I think the impact is more about piling on to a sense that climate change isn’t really something we should worry about,” says Stokes. Of course it makes sense to continue to develop better, affordable climate tech. The companies that Gates’s Breakthrough Ventures has backed can play a meaningful role. But Gates could do more to help scale up the clean tech that’s ready now. While startups can also help later, “I think it’s important to recgnize that if you’re going to reduce climate emissions at scale and make electricity bills more affordable in this moment, you have to deploy technologies that are already at scale,” says Shah. “We have so many technologies that are stalled at, like, 5% of penetration,” Shah says. “We have 5% of our rooftops in the United States, maybe 6% now, with solar panels on them. Australia is at 30%. How do we go from 5% to 30%? We’re figuring that out today. I would love his help on that.”
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