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The Surprising Habit That’s Sabotaging Your Productivity

(and What to Do Instead)

Marshall Hargrave
4 min readJan 22, 2025
Photo by Rowan Fonda on Unsplash

Multitasking has become a badge of honor.

We pride ourselves on our ability to juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities at once, bouncing from email to meeting to project without missing a beat.

But here’s the dirty little secret about multitasking: it’s not making you more productive.

In fact, it’s likely doing the exact opposite.

Numerous studies have shown that multitasking is a myth.

Our brains are not wired to focus on multiple things at once — instead, what we’re really doing is rapidly switching between tasks, a process that comes with a heavy cognitive cost.

Every time we shift our attention from one task to another, we incur a “switching cost” — a brief mental lag as our brain reorients itself to the new task.

These switching costs may only be a few seconds each, but they add up quickly over the course of a day, leading to decreased productivity, increased errors, and mental fatigue.

So if multitasking is so ineffective, why do we keep doing it?

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Marshall Hargrave
Marshall Hargrave

Written by Marshall Hargrave

Serial entrepreneur. Finance, startups, investing. Catalyst-focused, event-driven. Hip-hop vigilante. On the quest for the best hot chicken.

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