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Humans are driven by productivity, wanting to fill every minute with action. We’re wired to want to be useful, stay in motion, and prove our worth. We prove to ourselves, our colleagues, and our managers that we are useful. Multitasking promises that we can do more, faster, and please the managers and upper managers who are all demanding it. Job descriptions ask for multitasking, even though it’s been shown time and again the only thing multitasking does is multiply your tasks.

As Tonianne DeMaria and I wrote years ago in Personal Kanban, no matter how hard we try, we’re not designed to juggle flaming torches, let alone eight projects. Yet much of the praise in the modern workplace goes to the “master jugglers,” burning out in the pursuit of false efficiency.

Efficiency is not how many things you can show someone you did, it’s removing obstacles to doing the right thing at the right time.

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Science is stubborn. It just keeps looking at things, even when it finds things we don’t expect or are uncomfortable with.

In a Stanford study on multitasking, frequent multitaskers performed worse than their focused peers on every metric. They scored lower on the ability to pay attention, to remember what they did, and to filter distractions. They lost control of their time, working on multiple tasks at once, without taking time to plan or improve. When they multitasked, they increased their cognitive load, allowed distractions, and made errors more likely and completion less likely. Quality wasn’t even part of the conversation.​

It doesn’t matter if you’re a programmer, a project manager, or a CEO, if you do more work than you can handle, your performance drops. I’ve spoken with many CxOs who are frustrated that “no one want to work any more.” But when we’ve gone deep on just their workload, they see how much they leave unfinished or delegate with vague directives that they could have sworn (and do repeatedly swear are “quite clear”). It takes them a while to realize that their directives are deliverables and those deliverables were low quality. They were multitasking, feeling productive, creating mayhem.

The majority of “multitasking” is just frantic task-switching. This gives the illusion of productivity, which provides a false sense of security (I’m productive everything is fine). But in the end, we all fall prey to the Zeigarnik Effect, a psychological bear trap, which keeps unfinished business looping in our brains, adding more anxiety to the pile. Every task we start, we keep thinking about until its finished. Our brains only have so much space, and we break down our ability to process. We forget things, we rush things, we become testy, we start to avoid things.

We convince ourselves we’re busy, but the real outcome is overload and our teams, our companies pay the price in missed deadlines, quality slips, and employee churn. We individuals pay the price in stress, sick days, and less tolerance for literally everything around us.​

The Fix: Building a Board to Fix Overload

This series uses Personal Kanban as a tool to see work, align with team members and stakeholders, and calm our workloads. If you are unfamiliar with it, here is the book.

We’re going to start with the assumption that people don’t want crappy work done late with surprising changes. We further assume that we all, at every level, want people to do the right thing at the right time and to quickly note when our plans aren’t going to work.

So, in this board today we are going to focus not on priorities, not on limiting work in process, and not even on quality. We are simply going to make sure people know why we are doing what we are doing and when something important happens.

For You: Dismantling Multitasking Stress

* You see what people want from you. Both tasks and strategies. You see which goals each task supports, and you’re empowered to say, “if this is client relationship work, let’s include them now.” Suddenly, quality and partnership take precedence over frantic solo delivery.

* WIP limits and visible board congestion are conversation starters, not personal failures; they create context for realistic planning, self-advocacy, and ideas of how to make the strategies work.

* Agency is built in. Instead of being crushed by work you didn’t consent to, you can point to the board and have transparent conversations about what’s possible.

For the Project Manager: Delivery through Effectiveness

* Boards tie every backlog item to strategic focus, ensuring that it’s not just “next on the list,” but valuable to upper management, clients, and team.

* When too many tasks are in “Doing,” this form urges the team to collaborate, prioritize, or escalate before the flood causes quality to drop and shows people throughout the company what is happening and why. (You don’t have to come up with a slide deck apology.)

* Instead of defaulting to more status meetings, project managers (and everyone else) use the board as a lens for spotting where help is needed, and where throughput is about to stall.

Leadership: ROI and Strategy were Murdered by Multitasking … not any more

* Metrics show not just dumb-speed, but how smart-strategy is moving / evolving / succeeding. You see how real work (not just work units) is flowing.

* You can now participate as part of the company. Your own overload is lessened as projects stop having bad surprises, territory wars diminish, and in general, people start working with you and not waiting for corrective action.

* The whole company owns the relationships, the planning, and the strategy.

A Shared Mission Beyond Just the Board

In the video, Julie’s team learned that working in this way is about more than “throughput.” It is possible to build and maintain a culture of context, collaboration, and conversation. Instead of optimizing for doing more (productivity), the board and the people optimize for “doing more that matters” (effectiveness). When every ticket on the board tracks back to a real goal, and everyone can finish right.

Next Episode: We’ll unpack how overload forms feedback loops that sabotage us and what to do about it.

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