Focus Doesn’t Scale

I need to get better at multitasking.

This feedback, which I received a few weeks ago, came as a bit of a surprise. Mainly because, for a long time, I have been practising the opposite, trying instead to perfect the art of focusing on whatever task I feel is most important and blocking out distractions. I’m pretty good at this. I find it relatively easy to tunnel in on something, enter into a flow state, and ignore pretty much everything else.

I even consider this to be a gift. Other people complain about being unfocused and easy to distract. I am not.

But what helps me perform well at tasks like writing or coding is, possibly, not such a good thing for managing — a responsibility I am now grappling with.

As my focus has turned from my own output to the output of my team, I realise — and have been told — that being available to my team and keeping multiple plates spinning at once is now the priority. If a member of my team is blocked, it’s my responsibility to unblock them quickly. If there’s a (metaphorical) fire that needs putting out, it’s my job to fix the problem or find someone else who will.

But what does multitasking actually mean? Can it be learned? Is it really something worth sacrificing deep focus to achieve?

There are conflicting views about multitasking on the web. Some people claim that women are better at it than men (according to a 2021 study, the reverse could be true). Others suggest that actual multitasking is impossible, and what people really mean is the ability to fluidly switch from one task to another.

But people can do multiple things at once. Take driving. One of the biggest challenges as a learner is operating the pedals, steering wheel and gear stick at the same time. You need to do all this while also keeping an eye on the road and responding to obstacles, pedestrians and other drivers. When learning, each of these tasks requires active attention. But once you’ve been driving for a while, most of the time they drift into the background.

So, we can think of multi-tasking as covering both parallel actions (doing two or more things at once) or sequential actions (switching from one task to another).

I believe it’s possible — and desirable — for me to improve at both, with the caveat that parallel execution requires the “background” tasks to be simple enough that they can truly be relegated to background thought or muscle memory: think, checking Slack messages while working on something else, but only giving them enough attention to determine whether it’s worth breaking flow to address reply now or deal with them later. Urgent task? Important person? Reply now. Otherwise, make a mental note and move on.

Then there’s task switching. The difficulty here is that moving from one context to another can be damaging to focus and flow. The better you are at each task, the easier it’ll be to switch over and become productive quickly. That’s good and bad. It’s good, because we tend to get better at things over time; it’s bad, because that can take a while!

But becoming better at task switching is not purely a question of ability. Having good systems and taking good notes can make a huge difference here.

For example, I have organised my Slack so that only my ten most important channels are always visible, and the rest show up only if I am tagged directly. Those ten channels are neatly organised into different categories. Meanwhile, I have marked only a handful of people as VIPs, whose messages show up ahead of everyone else.

This has made a huge difference to how easy I find it to respond quickly. When I open Slack, it’s much easier to see the important stuff. I appear better at multitasking, but really, I have a system that helps me better identify what’s worth breaking my focus for. I even changed my Slack theme from dark mode (which felt a bit too casual, like Discord) to a white-and-blue theme that felt important and corporate, in a bid to game my psychology so that I feel a little less relaxed when those more important messages land.

I have made similar changes to how I manage my calendar app and my notes, though my note-taking could still do with some work. Right now, my notes are organised by date, but I think basing them around individuals or topics would be much more effective.

This back-to-basics mentality of examining how I work and looking for where I can make things easier or more systematic has had a significant impact. If you’re technical, like me, you can also think about whether there are things you do repeatedly that could be automated.

But a thorny question remains. If I over-index on multitasking, am I leaving less room for deep thought that could lead to more impactful work and better long-term planning? At Amazon, Jeff Bezos is famous for structuring meetings around six-page memos — which typically take a week to produce — on the grounds that writing things down is the best way to clarify your thinking. He attributes a lot of Amazon’s success to this culture of writing. Whatever you think of Amazon and Bezos, I can see clear benefits of promoting a culture of deeper thought via writing. In fact, one of the main benefits of writing this article has been to clarify my own thinking on the topic of multitasking. But it’s hard to imagine producing long and considered documents like this if you’re always jumping from one thing to the next.

The answer to this conundrum is — as so often — to try to strike a balance between being available for context switching and creating space for deep work. I’m trying this by sacrificing my mornings to meetings and interruptions, but asking people to talk to me before booking anything in for the afternoons. It’s not a perfect system, as some people only have free slots in the afternoon, and some interruptions can’t wait, but it gives me a higher probability of some interrupted deep work for at least a part of the day.