The Myth of “Multitasking is a Myth”

If you’re into productivity at all (and everyone should be), you will have probably come across the idea that you shouldn’t try to do many things simultaneously. Block scheduling, top 3 tasks for the day, prioritise and focus on one thing.

I won’t argue those are great approaches, but there’s an oversimplification when saying that we can’t multitask. I fully subscribe to the idea of switch tasking, which has a cost associated with switching between different tasks, which is something we should minimise.

There is a presumption that switch tasking is what is always happening. As is often the case, an analogy is made between our brain and a computer, especially the way computer processors used to be (a single core with a clock speed that then works through processing one thing at a time very quickly).

Pick a task, any task. Just do that one task. You were also breathing. Your heart was beating. You were digesting. Even in the task itself, no matter how simple, your brain was operating on multiple things at once, assessing and dealing with the task, which will always be when it comes down to it a complex action (if it weren’t, you’d have automated it by now right?).

I realise this isn’t the point of saying why we shouldn’t multitask, but it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater to assume that it’s an extreme literal “not possible”, and we often take it to mean that. It’s a vast underestimation of our capabilities.

Our minds and bodies are, in fact, amazing automation machines with true multitasking and parallel processing features. We should find ways to use that.

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