As a technical leader you are being pulled in more and more directions. You are forced every day to choose what to do in the few hours you are given. There appear to be no end to urgent demands on your time. It is tempting to think you can be efficient and do more than one thing at once. Do not.

There is a myth that many people still subscribe to that you can do more than one thing at once. It continues to be shown that a human only can focus on one thing at any given time. People that think they are multitasking are just switching between doing more than one thing badly.

Although you are human, you are very similar to a CPU core. You cannot do more than one thing at a time. At any given instant, you are doing one thing. You may try and trick yourself into believing you can multitask in the same way modern operating systems time-slice different processes. Unfortunately, we humans are much worse than computers at spending fraction of seconds on different tasks without massive context switching costs.

You may believe there are tasks you can tune for the purpose of multitasking. One of the most prevalent I see is people who believe they can listen in on a conference call while checking e-mail. All it takes is a pointed question followed by “what do you think Dan?” to unravel the ruse and require that you ask “Would you please repeat the question?” You have just demonstrated that you are not actually on the call because you were not actively listening.

We do this more openly in other circumstances. Perhaps we check out e-mail on the phone while in a meeting in which we feel less pressure to actively participate. Or perhaps you even feel comfortable checking your phone while in the middle of a conversation with another person assuming you can listen to them while reading a note from a colleague. The listener in this situation immediately knows the conversation has been parked aside. This small act does damage to the relationship when you have to inevitably ask “would you repeat that?”

We have many unconscious habits in our day to day life. We may take the same route to work every day and drive on “autopilot”. We may habitually check our phone for new e-mail. We may habitually turn to our computer when we are at our desk. Force yourself to challenge the unconscious habits that have you acting before you think. Decide what you are working on, and put away the distractions if you have a habit of letting them interrupt what you are doing.

Do not kid yourself that you can multitask, and do not let your unconscious habits interrupt your current focus. Decide what you need to be focused on right now, and train your focus to stay on task.