If You Can Multitask, It Isn’t Important Work
I realized I was bad at multitasking in a dentist’s chair.
During a scaling procedure, I tried to keep my eyes open and watch what the dentist was doing, while also keeping water out of my throat and managing my breathing. I struggled badly. I kept pausing, convinced water was going down the wrong way. The dentist got visibly annoyed with me.
Then I closed my eyes.
Just breathing and holding the water — two things, nothing else. And almost immediately I found a rhythm. The rest of the procedure went smoothly.
Nothing about my ability changed in those seconds. What changed was that I stopped pretending I could do four things at once.
The uncomfortable rule
Since then I’ve accepted something about how I work: I can multitask — but only on things that produce low value.
That’s not a limitation of willpower; it’s arithmetic. Context switching has a cost, and that cost is paid out of depth. When you spread attention across tasks, every task gets the shallow version of you. Shallow work tolerates that. Deep work doesn’t.
Humans aren’t processors running parallel threads. Something always gets sacrificed when we try — and if nothing feels sacrificed, that’s usually the tell: the tasks weren’t demanding anything worth sacrificing for.
Which leads to an uncomfortable inversion of the usual resume-speak:
If you can multitask comfortably, you’re probably doing work that doesn’t matter much.
Nobody scales a distributed system while answering support tickets. Nobody writes a good essay mid-meeting. The work we’re proudest of, in any field, is work that refused to share attention.
The escape
Look at where multitasking is required and a pattern appears: operational desks, support lines, service work — jobs where responsiveness matters more than depth. These are survival-mode jobs. You stay reactive because you have to, and the constant switching makes it hard to ever leave.
So the practical conclusion isn’t “get better at multitasking.” It’s: get out of work whose very structure forces shallowness — and be suspicious of any schedule of yours that brags about juggling.
I don’t know anyone who dreams of a life spent context-switching. If it can be helped, it should be helped. I’m working on it myself.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2025-05-04), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.