The myth of doing it all: why you end the day exhausted and with no results

Modern life told us that being a “multitasker” is an amazing quality. The plain, honest truth is that, in the end, multitaskers are mediocre at everything.

Doing everything at once is tiring because the brain can’t handle two tasks that need attention at the same time. It jumps from one to the other, and every jump costs energy and leaves part of your mind stuck on what you left behind. By the end of the day, a good share of the tiredness comes from those switches.

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. So why do some people seem to accomplish twice as much, while others end the day completely exhausted, feeling like they finished nothing?

Think of your focus as a glass holding exactly 300 ml of water. When you try to do three things at once, like answering an email, listening in on a meeting and writing a report, it’s like trying to pour that water quickly and simultaneously into three smaller 100 ml glasses. What happens? The water spills. You lose a bit of liquid with every quick change of direction. In your brain, that “spilled water” is your energy and attention being wasted in the transition from one task to another.

Can the brain do two things at once?

In practice, the brain almost never does two attention-demanding things at the same time. What it does is switch from one to the other very quickly, and every switch has a cost. In classic experiments, psychologists Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans measured that cost: switching between tasks made people slower and more error-prone, and the damage grew the more complex the tasks were.¹ Every switch is a little water on the floor.

Even people who think they’re good at it usually pay the price. At Stanford University, researchers compared people who use several screens and apps at the same time all day long with people who rarely do. The “card-carrying multitaskers” did worse at filtering out distractions and at switching tasks, exactly the skill they thought they were training.²

There are exceptions, but they’re rare. A study at the University of Utah tested people driving in a simulator while solving memory and math problems. Only about 2.5% managed to do both without getting worse at either.³ The odds that you, me and that coworker with “multitasking” on their résumé are in that group are slim.

What about the willpower battery?

For many years, the idea that willpower works like a phone battery was very popular: you wake up at 100%, and every effort to resist a distraction drains a bit of it. It made sense and showed up in lots of books. But when 23 labs in several countries repeated the experiment behind this idea, using the same method and many more participants, the effect barely showed up at all.⁴

That doesn’t mean fatigue isn’t real. You feel that the end of the day is harder, and it really is. The point is that the wear seems to come less from a draining tank and more from how we split our attention, how many open loops we carry and how much we rest. That’s good news, because those things can be changed.

The big problem for people who try to do everything at once is the illusion of wanting to keep life in balance. Perfect balance requires giving the same attention to everything, which keeps you from truly committing to anything.

How do you get more done without doing it all at once? Leaning in instead of balancing

Leaning in means owning a priority. When you act according to your priority, you intentionally take weight off other things to focus on what matters. The magic of results doesn’t happen in the center, trying to keep every plate spinning. It happens at the edges of your focus.

Instead of trying to do ten things in a mediocre way today and spreading your water all over the table, ask yourself just one question: what’s the one thing I can do today that will make everything else easier or even unnecessary? That question became famous in the book The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.⁵

In practice, this can be very simple. Pick that task before you open your email. Set aside a block of time just for it, with notifications off. And if something else comes up in the middle, write it down on paper to deal with later, instead of jumping from glass to glass.

Find that answer and pour all your water there.

To pour your water into the right glass, here are three more reads:

• If your list never ends, here’s the one-task rule for getting done what you planned.
• Your phone is an expert at pulling your attention into another glass, so learn about the quick reward trap.
• When your head gets too full, mistakes go up. See how to pave the road in your brain.

Editor’s note: We all have that coworker who proudly lists “multitasking” on their résumé but, in practice, is only an expert at starting ten things at once and ending the day without finishing any of them. Send this article their way. It’s an elegant way to let them know their water is spilling everywhere and that doing the basics well would already be excellent progress.

Footnotes

1. Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E. & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763-797. ↩ source

2. Ophir, E., Nass, C. & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583-15587. ↩ source

3. Watson, J. M. & Strayer, D. L. (2010). Supertaskers: Profiles in extraordinary multitasking ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17(4), 479-485. ↩ source

4. Hagger, M. S., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. et al. (2016). A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 546-573. ↩ source

5. Keller, G. & Papasan, J. (2013). The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. Bard Press. ↩ source