What looks like multitasking is almost always rapid task-switching, and research shows it can cost up to 40% of productive time. Only around 2.5% of people can genuinely run two demanding tasks at once without a performance drop. The fix isn’t asking people to focus harder; it’s time management training and better task sequencing, built as a team habit rather than left to individual willpower.
Every team has this one legend who answers emails/messages mid-meeting, has four browser tabs of “urgent” open at once, and still somehow gets their reports in on time. We call them probably call them a great multitasker.
However, they’re not doing two things at once. Like a computer’s RAM they are switching between things very fast. And unless that RAM has a huge capacity, that constant “switching” would become a costly endeavour.
To be clear from the outset, this isn’t about employees doing anything wrong. Juggling more than one project is a completely normal part of most modern jobs, and plenty of people do it well. The issue isn’t that people multitask, it’s that very few of us have ever actually been taught how to do it in a way that protects our own focus and wellbeing. That’s a training gap, not a talent gap.
What the research actually says
The brain doesn’t run two demanding tasks in parallel; it toggles. Each toggle carries what researchers call a “switch cost”: a small delay while the brain drops the mental rules for one task and loads up the rules for another. Individually, each switch might only cost a few seconds. Across a full workday, it adds up in ways most of us underestimate.
A few figures worth sitting with:
The foundational research behind the American Psychological Association’s position on task-switching found it can consume as much as 40% of a person’s productive time.
Field research tracking real information workers found people spend an average of just 11–12 minutes on a task before switching away from it and that 57% of work sessions get interrupted before completion.
Estimates of recovery time after an interruption range from roughly 20 to 25 minutes to fully return to the original task, and workers often bounce through more than two other tasks before they get back to it.
Only around 2.5% of people who we can term as “supertaskers” can genuinely run two complex tasks at once without a measurable drop in performance. For the rest of us, what feels like multitasking is task-switching wearing a disguise.
And here’s the part that matters most for how we talk about this: the people who believe they’re excellent multitaskers are consistently shown to perform the worst at it. That’s not a character flaw, it’s just how attention works. Which is exactly why your most capable, most trusted people, the ones who get handed the most at once, are often the ones absorbing the highest hidden cost.
It’s not a people problem – it’s a systems problem
None of this means your team should be doing less, or that handling multiple projects is somehow a mistake. Most workplaces genuinely need people who can hold more than one priority at a time. The real question is whether they’ve been given the tools to do it well, clear prioritisation, sensible sequencing, and permission to protect focus, or whether they’re just expected to figure it out through sheer effort.
Left unsupported, constant switching doesn’t just cost output. It costs energy. People can be flat-out busy from 9 to 5 and still finish the day feeling like they got nothing done, simply because their attention was fragmented across dozens of small interruptions rather than genuinely absent.
That’s a workplace design and skills issue, not a work ethic one, and it’s genuinely fixable. A lot of what looks like individual distraction is actually a symptom of poor meeting culture too, worth a look at our piece on meeting overload if back-to-back calendars are part of the picture for your team.
Recognise this pattern in your own team already?
What actually helps
Prioritise before switching, not during it. Knowing what actually matters today, rather than reacting to whatever lands next, is the single biggest lever for protecting focus. This is the core of solid time management and prioritisation training: a simple, repeatable way to decide what earns attention first.
Sequence projects properly. A lot of what looks like “multitasking overload” is really several projects competing for the same person with no clear order of operations. Corporate project management training and project management skills training give people the tools to sequence, delegate, and hand off work properly, so they’re not mentally holding six things at once.
Protect blocks of real focus time. Even 60-90 minutes of genuinely undisturbed work can outproduce a scattered day. This works best as a team norm, not a personal hack one person is trying to defend alone.
Make it a shared habit. A workplace time management workshop that gets a whole team working from the same playbook tends to stick far longer than individual willpower up against a culture of constant pings.
Self-care deserves a seat at the table too
There’s one piece of this that’s easy to leave out of a productivity conversation, and it shouldn’t be: looking after the people doing the juggling.
Australia’s right to disconnect laws exist for a reason, research consistently shows that employees who can genuinely switch off after hours sleep better, report lower anxiety, and come back more focused, not less. Recent industry survey data found that the vast majority of Australian office workers are contacted by their employer outside working hours, and where that’s the norm, burnout tends to follow. Our piece on workplace burnout goes deeper into what that pattern costs Australian businesses and what leaders can do about it.
Training a team to manage their time and projects well isn’t complete if it stops at 5 pm. It should also include:
- Building genuine boundaries around after-hours emails and calls
- Recognising the early signs of overload before they become burnout
- Treating rest and recovery as part of performance, not a reward for finishing everything
A team that’s taught to prioritise well and switch off properly tends to outperform one that’s simply been told to “manage their time better” and left to sort out the rest alone.
Not entirely, a small share of people (roughly 2.5%) can run two complex tasks at once without a performance drop. For almost everyone else, what feels like multitasking is rapid task-switching, which carries a real cost in accuracy and time.
No. Handling multiple projects is a normal, valuable skill, the difference lies in how it’s done. With good prioritisation and project sequencing, people can manage several priorities well. Without it, the same workload turns into constant, costly switching.
Common signs include people feeling “busy but unproductive,” missed details on tasks that should be straightforward, rising stress levels, and top performers increasingly working outside normal hours just to get focused time.
Time management training focuses on how an individual decides what to work on and when. Project management skills training focuses on how work is planned, sequenced, and handed off across a team. Most workplaces benefit from a mix of both.
It’s a core part of it, not an add-on. A program that teaches people to prioritise and sequence their work but doesn’t also address after-hours boundaries and recovery time is only solving half the problem.
If any of this sounds familiar for your team, we’d be glad to talk through what a tailored time management or project management program could look like for your workplace.
Ready to give your team the tools to protect their focus?
