Why Multitasking Is a Myth?

Multitasking is widely regarded today as a skill worth cultivating. The word describes doing several things at once — listening to a lecture while typing out a message at the very same moment. Many people treat this ability as something you either have or can train. The more windows you keep open at once, the more productive your work appears to be. The trouble is that the assumption underlying this whole belief is simply false.

Let’s start with what happens in your head when you try to do two things at once. The brain doesn’t process two demanding tasks in parallel, even though that’s how it feels. Instead, it jumps very quickly from one activity to the other and back again. Each such jump requires you to reset your goal and recall the rules of the task. It takes fractions of a second, so it’s easy to miss. But those fractions add up, and the number of small errors climbs along with them. That’s why, when you return to an interrupted text, for a moment you don’t quite know what you’re reading. What we take for multitasking is therefore a string of rapid returns to work we’ve just set aside.

The cost of these jumps isn’t fixed — it grows when a task is harder or new. And something new and hard is exactly what you face every single time you learn. This was shown in a study where students listened to a lecture with a laptop on their desk¹. Half of them also completed online tasks unrelated to the class. After the lecture, everyone took the same test of how well they’d understood the material. Those who split their attention between the lecture and the internet scored 11% lower. Tellingly, the same drop hit both simple facts and harder questions alike.

The most striking part of this study, though, is something else. In a second experiment, some students merely had a classmate with a laptop within view. They themselves did nothing but listen to the lecture and take notes by hand. Even so, they scored a full 17% lower than those with an undisturbed view. Someone else’s screen flickering off to the side works a bit like secondhand smoke — it harms you even though it’s somebody else lighting up. So it’s enough for a person beside you to divide their attention for your own learning to suffer too.

You might think that someone who practices multitasking all day long eventually gets good at it. Researchers at Stanford decided to test this and compared two groups². Some rarely combined different media; others did it almost constantly. It turned out that heavy multitaskers were worse at filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their surroundings. They also had a harder time ignoring irrelevant information that had earlier entered their memory. They even performed worse at task-switching itself. The size of this effect is itself a matter of debate, and some replication attempts have yielded weaker results. Even so, when researchers looked for tasks at which heavy multitaskers might prove better, they found no such advantage. What’s more, the study itself doesn’t settle whether multitasking weakens attention, or whether people with weaker attention simply multitask more often.

The strongest evidence of how fragile a thing attention is, however, came from a different study³. Participants worked through tasks measuring working memory and the ability to solve novel problems. Only one thing set them apart — where their own phone happened to be during the test. Some were asked to leave it in another room, others to keep it on the desk. The phones were silenced, lying face down, and no one touched them. And yet the mere presence of a phone on the desk lowered scores. The closer the device sat, the fewer mental resources were left for the task at hand. Crucially, silencing it or turning it face down did nothing to help. Part of the brain’s attention was working the whole time to keep from reaching for the phone. So you don’t even need to glance at the screen for the phone to already be costing you.

Since the greatest enemy of learning is divided attention, a good tool should do one thing. A phone can get in the way of learning when it lies beside you, but it can just as easily become a tool that helps you focus on a single task. Glimsy shows one flashcard on the screen at a time — no ten tabs open alongside. Nor do you have to decide how much to review today — the app takes that on for you. Every decision like that taken off your plate is one fewer opening for your attention to wander elsewhere. For those few minutes, the phone stops being a distraction and becomes the place where one task lives.

From all of this follows a simple conclusion: attention is a resource that has to be guarded. Set yourself a single short block for learning and nothing else — say, 15 or 20 minutes. No jumping between apps — for that stretch of time you do just one thing. At first, this kind of focus on a single task can feel unpleasant, even boring. That’s understandable — a habit of constant stimulation doesn’t vanish overnight. But that slight discomfort is precisely the sign that you’re reclaiming your attention for yourself. You don’t have to change everything at once — try it just once, for a single session, and see the difference. Multitasking isn’t your superpower — and that’s exactly why giving it up changes so much.