Stop multitasking: why constant task-switching is exhausting your brain and how to fix it

There’s a reason your brain feels like a browser with 37 tabs open and a tiny fan whirring underneath. Constant pings, split screens, and mid-sentence pivots don’t make you faster — they splinter your attention and tax your energy. The result isn’t just fatigue; it’s a quieter kind of erosion, where clarity and depth slip away. The fix isn’t monk mode or a cabin in the woods. It’s a handful of practical shifts that make room for real focus in a noisy day.

The morning looked perfectly normal. Laptop glowed, Slack popped, email chimed, and a half-written sentence sat blinking in a doc like a lighthouse in fog. A Teams call started, a calendar reminder flashed, and my tea went cold next to a to-do list that pretended to be friendly.

We all have lived that moment when your brain tries to attend to everything and ends up holding nothing. I watched a colleague mouth “one second” on screen while typing to someone else off screen, then apologise three times in the space of two minutes. The work didn’t stop. The thinking did. The silence in her head never came back after the fifth ping. The culprit was hiding in plain sight.

It wasn’t the workload.

Your brain on task-switching

Every time you switch tasks, your mind does a tiny boot sequence. It clears the last context, loads the next, and spends precious fuel doing admin in the background. That micro-cost doesn’t show up on a timesheet, yet it stacks up across the day. By late afternoon, the lights are on but the clarity is dim.

In one stretch of open-plan life, I tracked a marketing manager for an hour. She touched eight tools, responded to fourteen messages, and resumed the same slide deck six different times. Research from Gloria Mark suggests people switch screens about every few dozen seconds, and it can take more than twenty minutes to truly get back into a task after an interruption. That’s not laziness. That’s cognitive residue lingering like steam after a hot shower.

Here’s the logic: your prefrontal cortex handles executive control — selecting goals, inhibiting impulses, sequencing steps. When you hop between tasks, you are asking that system to reconfigure its ruleset repeatedly. Each reconfiguration burns glucose and floods working memory. Novelty brings a flick of dopamine, which feels productive in the moment. But novelty isn’t progress. **The brain loves newness; deep work loves sameness.** If your day is built on tiny jolts, your evening will be built on a heavy, wordless tiredness.

How to fix it (without going off-grid)

Try “one-screen, one-goal” blocks. Choose a single outcome for the next 25–40 minutes, close everything else, and set a visible timer. Put your phone in another room, not face down on the desk. Park incoming thoughts in a quick capture note so they stop knocking on the door. When time’s up, stand, breathe, then switch with intention. **Tiny fences make wide fields.**

Guard your start-of-day and pre-lunch hours for the tasks that actually move the needle. Batch shallow work into two short windows: messages in one burst, admin in another. Say out loud what you’re switching to and why; it sounds silly, but it anchors attention. Let colleagues know you’ll respond at set times. Let your calendar reflect it. Let’s be honest: nobody really does that every day. Aim for most days, most weeks.

Interruptions will still creep in. The trick is reducing their weight.

“Focus isn’t a personality trait. It’s a resource you protect from friction and noise,” said a neuroscientist I interviewed after he watched a newsroom in full swing.

Try this tiny checklist during your next block:

• Before you start: write the next two visible steps on a sticky note.
• During: full screen mode, single tab, headphones on even if no music.
• If pinged: triage in five words — “Now, later, or ignore.”
• When done: log one sentence of what changed, then step away for 60–90 seconds.

Give your brain back its edges

Here’s a quiet experiment for the week: choose one hour a day where nothing gets to jump the queue. Tell your tools. Tell your team. Then watch what happens to the quality of your attention, not just the quantity of your output. **You’ll see fewer half-thoughts and more finished ideas.**

People don’t need radical discipline; they need gentle defaults that make the good thing easier. You’re not fighting your phone or your inbox. You’re redesigning the stage so the right actor steps into the light. Try pairing tasks that share a mental “shape,” and spread the shape-shifting work across the day. Give yourself one place to find notes, one place to park tasks, one place to decide. *Simplicity is a kindness to a tired brain.*

This is less about productivity and more about presence. The work you care about deserves unbroken thought, even if just in small pockets. Change the pockets, and the day changes shape. The feeling at 5 p.m. changes with it.

FAQ :

• Isn’t multitasking a useful skill in fast jobs?It’s useful to juggle responsibilities, but not to split attention. Fast jobs benefit from rapid prioritisation, not simultaneous thinking.
• How long should a focus block be?Start with 25–40 minutes. If you feel momentum, extend to 60–90. End before you’re spent so you want to come back.
• What if my boss expects instant replies?Share your response windows and keep them reliable. Most teams prefer predictability over constant availability once they see the results.
• Do notifications really matter that much?Yes. Even unclicked pings create cognitive load. Silence or schedule them and you’ll feel the difference by lunchtime.
• How do I stop checking my phone?Put it in another room during blocks. Use a charging station far from your desk. Out of sight isn’t perfect, but it’s powerfully honest.