{"id":444,"date":"2026-05-30T19:06:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T00:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/?p=444"},"modified":"2026-07-31T19:11:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T00:11:27","slug":"the-multitasking-myth-why-doing-more-is-costing-you-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/the-multitasking-myth-why-doing-more-is-costing-you-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"The Multitasking Myth: Why Doing More Is Costing You Everything!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; line-height: 0;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"width: 100%; height: auto; display: block;\" src=\"\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/07\/g3L4SMeiZ7oLCIjhxbuZ104623.png\" alt=\"It's P Foundation\"><\/p>\n<p><strong>The illusion we built together<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Picture a typical Monday morning. Emails piling up, a Zoom call running in the background, a report half-finished, and Slack pinging every 90 seconds. By noon, you&#8217;ve been &#8220;working&#8221; for four hours &mdash; yet somehow, the to-do list looks exactly the same.<br>This is multitasking culture in action. And it has become so normalized in modern workplaces that we rarely stop to ask: is this actually working for us?<br>The answer, backed by science, is a clear no. What feels like efficiency is actually the brain in constant damage-control mode &mdash; rapidly switching between tasks, losing context with every jump, and accumulating cognitive debt we don&#8217;t even notice until burnout arrives.<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.apa.org\">\n<p>&#8220;The brain doesn&#8217;t multitask. It task-switches. And every switch has a cost.&#8221;<\/p>\n<footer>&mdash; <cite>American Psychological Association<\/cite><\/footer><\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><strong><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\">What the research actually tells us<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\">Stanford researchers led by Clifford Nass found that heavy multitaskers were significantly more vulnerable to distraction &mdash; they struggled to filter irrelevant information and performed worse on memory tasks. Their conclusion? Heavy multitaskers are essentially training their brains to be less focused.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\">A 2025 study on virtual meetings found that multitasking during video calls increased fatigue across multiple dimensions and reduced objective performance &mdash; without improving the person&#8217;s subjective sense of how they did. In other words: you think you&#8217;re keeping up. You&#8217;re not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\">And in a study of IT sector employees, job stress mediated 35.73% of the relationship between multitasking and overall wellbeing. The more fragmented the attention, the greater the toll on mental health.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><strong><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\">It&#8217;s not a personal problem. It&#8217;s a system problem.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\">The WHO and ILO have officially classified excessive workload, fast work pace, unclear roles, and constant interruptions as psychosocial risks &mdash; factors that directly undermine employee mental health. This isn&#8217;t about individuals who can&#8217;t focus. It&#8217;s about organizational cultures that have made fragmented attention the default.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\">When everything is urgent, nothing is. When every message demands an immediate response, deep work disappears. And when deep work disappears, so does innovation, quality, and genuine engagement.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\"><strong>Multitasking Culture:&nbsp;<\/strong>Constant interruptions &middot; Reactive decisions &middot; Error-prone work &middot; Mental exhaustion &middot; Burnout &middot; High turnover &middot; &#8220;Always busy, rarely effective&#8221;<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"cvGsUA direction-ltr align-start para-style-body\"><span class=\"a_GcMg font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none\"><strong>Focus Culture: <\/strong>Protected deep work &middot; Intentional priorities &middot; Higher quality output &middot; Psychological safety &middot; Sustainable performance &middot; Teams that actually thrive<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What actually works: Two practices worth trying<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Time blocking assigns specific hours to specific types of work<\/strong> &#8211; When you block 9&ndash;11am for deep thinking and 3&ndash;4pm for emails, you stop making decisions all day about what to do next &mdash; and you protect the mental space required to do your best work.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Task batching groups with similar tasks &mdash;<\/strong> All emails at once, all calls in a row, all creative work in one sitting. Instead of switching contexts 40 times a day. you. The cognitive savings are enormous.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>These aren&#8217;t productivity hacks. They&#8217;re structural adjustments that honor how human attention actually works &mdash; and how organizations can protect it at scale.<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.apa.org\">\n<p>&#8220;The goal isn&#8217;t to do more at once. It&#8217;s to do one thing well &mdash; and mean it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>At <strong>Its P Foundation<\/strong>, we believe sustainable performance starts with protecting the human mind.&nbsp;<br>Join our community, explore our resources, and take the first step toward a healthier, more intentional workplace.<\/p>\n<p><cite> Sources: American Psychological Association &middot; Stanford University (Clifford Nass et al.) &middot; University of California, Irvine &middot; WHO\/ILO Joint Report on Mental Health at Work &middot; SimplyMeaningful Coaching Solutions (2024) &middot; Leydi V. Garc&iacute;a \/ Guiando con Amor (2025) &middot; IT sector wellbeing study (2025) &middot; Video-conferencing multitasking study (2025)<\/cite><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You wear multitasking like a badge. But what if that badge is quietly draining your focus, your health, and your team&#8217;s potential?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.itspfoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}