More screens, less attention: the cost of constant multitasking

You’re not multitasking — you’re actually doing everything worse.

We’ve all done it. Sorry; tried to do it. Checked email during a meeting. Scrolled social media while on a Zoom call. Switched between writing a report and replying to texts, with Spotify running in the background, and maybe a podcast, just for good measure.

It feels productive. Efficient. Like we’re keeping up.

But the science is clear: we’re definitely not.

In fact, study after study (feel free to google this yourself) shows that what we call multitasking isn’t multitasking at all. It’s task-switching. Jumping rapidly between activities and pretending we’re focused. According to Stanford University, heavy multitaskers are actually worse at filtering out irrelevant information, remembering details, and switching between tasks efficiently. The more we do it, the worse we get.

Fun fact: people who believe they are great at multitasking … are often the worst at it.

One famous study from the University of London found that people who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score drops equivalent to missing a full night of sleep. In one experiment, they actually performed worse than people who were high on cannabis. Whoa!

It’s not just about productivity, either. Constant distraction changes how we relate to others. When your brain is split across three things at once, it’s impossible to really listen. You might hear the words — but you’ll miss the tone, the body language, the context. And that’s where the connection lives.

Attention is a limited resource. Every time you divide it, you get a smaller slice, and so does the person in front of you. Over time, this creates a kind of shallow thinking. We become reactive. Impatient. Intolerant of silence, slowness, depth. We skim instead of reading. We reply instead of reflecting. We check boxes instead of focusing on what actually matters.

And then we wonder why everything feels so rushed, why our meetings are noisy but hollow and most of all useless and unnecessary, and why we finish the day mentally fried … and somehow still behind.

The point here isn’t to shame ourselves. It’s to see clearly what is going on. You’re probably not lazy. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just letting yourself being pulled in too many directions at the same time. But the human brain is built for that.