“Everything just seemed really important and urgent,” my overwhelmed client confessed. What followed was a tale every entrepreneur knows too well—starting one task, abandoning it midway for another “more urgent” one, then jumping to a third, fourth, and fifth until day’s end brought nothing but frustration and incomplete projects. Why does your brain betray you into this task-switching trap?
In today’s episode, I’m revealing why your brain’s “in-the-moment” decision-making is wired for survival, not productivity. You’ll understand exactly how to retrain your brain to work with your biology instead of against it, allowing you to accomplish more in less time without the frantic energy.
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In this episode, we cover:
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- The surprising truth about multitasking that productivity experts don’t want you to know
- Why your “in-the-moment brain” sets you up for task-switching failure every time
- The 30-second breathing technique that instantly breaks the task-switching cycle
- How half-finished projects are secretly draining your business profits
- The “one till it’s done” strategy that transforms scattered energy into focused results
- The dangerous societal myth about women and multitasking (and why it’s holding you back)
- How planning activates a different part of your brain that’s wired for success, not survival
The moment you stop treating multitasking as a badge of honor is the moment your productivity will skyrocket. Imagine ending each day with completed projects instead of scattered efforts—how would that transform your business and confidence? Your productivity breakthrough is waiting in this episode!
Ready to go deeper? Book a free call with me to discover which of my programs is right for you.
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Links & Mentioned Resources
The Productive Quarter
Time Masters
School Hours Only Mastermind
Book a call with Kirsty
Connect with Kirsty:
More about The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
The podcast to help you, as an ambitious high-achieving Type-A woman, master work-life balance as a business owner.
Join Kirsty Knight each week, so she can help you create the level of success you truly desire, in a business that you love, without needing to sacrifice time for yourself, your health, your family, and your enjoyment of life outside of your business. Without hustling, without working yourself into the ground, and without burning out.
Kirsty will be sharing lessons from her own business journey, business strategies, time management and productivity hacks, and the psychology you need to understand – to help you go from overworking and overwhelmed, to mastering your time and productivity, so you can be working less, and earning more.
If you are trying to build or scale your business, but find yourself struggling with overwhelm, self-sabotage, procrastination, distractions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hustling, overworking and always thinking “there just aren’t enough hours in the day”, this podcast is for you.
You CAN have it all. And she’s going to show you how.
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
Good morning my lovelies. How are you all today?
So I coached a client this week inside one of my containers, the productive quarter, on something called task switching, and I thought I’d share with you what came up around it, so that if you find yourself in this situation, in your business, which I’m hundred percent positive that you will at some point, you know what’s causing it, and you have a strategy for dealing with it in the moment, and then preventing it from happening again.
So what do I mean by task-switching?
Well, I’ll share what she actually came to me with. What she said was “I’ve been struggling this week with prioritising. Everything just seemed really important and urgent and what ended up happening was, I started one task and then half way through that task had the thought, oh no, I should be doing this other thing instead. So then I switched to that other thing and then partway through that task, thought, actually this other task is more important, but after a couple of minutes on that, I realised that I also needed to do this other thing and then there was another thing that also needed to be done, so then I started flitting between those two things, and at the end of a day of frantically working, I realised I didn’t have anything much to show for it.”
There were about 8 different tasks that she’d started. But nothing was finished. Nothing was completed. And she felt kind of crappy, very hustley, very reactive, overwhelmed and behind.
Now I know she isn’t the only one who has had this happen to them in their business. I know I sometimes catch myself in this urgent, frantic, reactive, task-hopping or task-switching mode.
And there are real problems with this. Not only does switching between different tasks take up time, and take up more energy than focusing on each one in series. But trying to actively think about and attempting to do multiple tasks at once is a surefire recipe for overwhelm. You end up with a bunch of half done tasks – so you aren’t actually getting any real feeling of accomplishment or progress, nor are you reaping the returns from your invested time. A half finished website is not bringing you clients until it’s published. So all that time invested in it, is not giving you a return back. You’re also not really getting the benefits of momentum if you keep stopping and starting tasks. You certainly aren’t getting into flow – because you keep distracting yourself from the task before you can get into that state. You are more likely to forget things because you are trying to keep multiple things in your head at once, and so there will be this refamiliarisation time required every time you go back to a task you’ve neglected. You are also more likely to be in a reactive state – which is not the best state to be in for problem-solving and creative thinking. And it all feels a lot more stressful.
So I’m gonna share what is often the root cause of it first, so that we can for the most part, avoid doing it in the first place, and then I’m gonna share a strategy you can use to snap yourself out of that mode, when you accidentally find yourself doing this, should you want to stop.
So there are typically five reasons behind why you might find yourself in the same situation.
So let’s dive into the first.
This is that you didn’t have a plan for what you were going to get done, specifically, and when you were going to get it done.
Which, by default, means that you didn’t have clear priorities either decided upon, or actively mapped out for working on.
And because you didn’t plan it ahead of time, your “in-the-moment” brain is having to decide what the priority is, out of the hundreds of potential tasks you could be doing.
The trouble with this is that your “in-the-moment” brain isn’t the best at making smart strategic decisions on what is the priority.
It finds it very hard to discern between what is urgent and what is important.
It finds it very hard to tell what the priorities are in that moment.
Because that “in the moment” brain is really only concerned with one thing and that is survival.
Not reaching your goals. Just survival. And so it is motivated by pleasure, and wants to conserve energy and avoid discomfort and fears and emotional pain at all costs.
So you can never trust the decisions your “in-the-moment” primitive part of your brain is making, as the best decisions for getting you to your goal. Because the primitive part of your brain isn’t worried about that. It’s worried about life-threatening thins.
And the trouble is, often none of these tasks and things that you need to do in your business today in that moment are life-threatening if you don’t do them.
There may be consequences to you not getting them done, which may not feel good, so your brain is trying to weigh up – is this consequence worse or better than that one?
But none of them are really life-threatening.
None really stand out.
And so what ends up happening is you pick one and you start doing it. But because your brain isn’t 100% sure this is the best use of your time, the second you think of another task that you could be doing your brain kind of freaks out and thinks maybe you should be doing that instead. And because it doesn’t know the answer, you then have the urge to move onto that next thing, which you follow, until your brain thinks of something else that needs to be done, and the cycle continues.
It essentially interprets everything as equally as important and urgent – so panics you into starting something, just anything, and then panics you into moving onto something else that isn’t getting done that it feels it should be, and then something else…and it goes on and on.
But there is a part of your brain that is different to your “ in the moment brain”. The prefrontal cortex. This is the executive higher functioning part of your brain that you activate when you think about things in the future. Now, this part of the brain is very good at thinking strategically, at coming up with the plan that is most likely going to get you to your goals. The roadmap if you like. And that roadmap has an order to things in it. The prefrontal cortex, the higher functioning part of your brain is not concerned with just surviving, it’s concerned with thriving.
And so it’s much better at identifying what is urgent and what is important and what can be ignored if it’s thinking about your goals.
But this part of your brain only works when you’re thinking ahead of time.
So this is one of the reasons why I advocate for planning ahead – and making decisions about what gets done and when which, by default, forces you to assess your priorities.
Particularly so when you frequently find yourself task-switching if you haven’t planned. Because when you take the time to make a plan, you can be sure that you are using a different part of your brain to the part that you use in the moment.
And it’s the best way to avoid yourself from ending up in this spinning out state where everything feels equally as important. Make sure you have a plan for tomorrow, before tomorrow gets here.
So that’s the first reason. You haven’t taken the time, ahead of time, to plan and prioritise and make strategic smart decisions around what needs to get done and when, and so when you find yourself in the moment making those decisions, you will undoubtedly be spinning around not knowing what is more important or urgent and this will lead you into the dreaded task-switching mode, of doing a little bit of one task, and then panickingly moving on to another, because your “in-the-moment” brain can’t decide on one – so it tries to make you do them all. Which of course, doesn’t work very effectively, as you cannot be in two places at once.
Now the second reason you may find yourself in this situation in your business, is that you did plan, you had taken the time to plan your strategy and make your decisions and know your priorities, but you aren’t honouring that plan.
And so exactly the same thing happens. Your “in-the-moment” brain is struggling to make sense of which task to do first, and which is more urgent and which is more important, because you are acting as though you don’t already have a smart plan, and so you end up trying to do a bit of each.
The third reason you may find yourself task-switching, is that you are just selecting tasks based on how you feel in the moment. What you feel like doing in the moment. And what you don’t feel like doing. And so you may start on one task, based on you “feeling” like doing it. But then as soon as you start to get bored, or the task starts to get hard, you move on to a different task. Until that one starts to get old or boring too. And then you pick another. And the cycle continues. You are essentially trying to escape from every single negative emotion and are chasing every bit of dopamine you can get. So this leads to you task-switching.
The fourth reason is that you haven’t recognised it’s a problem, and it’s just how you’ve typically worked before. Maybe you think all the tasks get done in the end anyway so it isn’t a problem, and so you intentionally chop and choose to do what you fancy, and what you think of. There’s no rhyme or reason behind what you do and when, and how long you stay on one task before you switch, and what you switch to. Even though you might have felt overwhelmed, or behind, or like you aren’t making much progress before, you haven’t labelled this way of working as the problem. So it’s more like a lack of awareness that is the real problem here. Or maybe you have the belief that it doesn’t make a difference. Maybe it isn’t faster or more efficient but you don’t believe it’s slower either. You don’t think it makes a difference if you are doing some of task A and then some of task B and then a bit of task C and then a bit more of A. You don’t think it matters what order you do them in.
You don’t think it makes any difference to your speed or your efficiency doing them a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of this.
If you believe that to be true then why would you plan? Why would you take time to do that? Why would you worry about the order of things? Why would you worry about stopping yourself from moving on to the next task? You would just be okay with flicking between all the tasks.
And then the last reason is denial that it is switch tasking. You secretly think it is faster, and that you are multi-tasking, and that you are capable of it. So maybe you even take pride in starting something, and then starting something else, and then thinking of something else to do, and then starting that too. Because you think it’s more efficient and faster this way. You think all the tasks are getting done more quickly because of this way of working.
So I just want you to take a second to check in, and ask yourself what your reason is.
Is it that you often find yourself not having planned ahead of time what you are going to be doing at that time, or that you have planned but don’t follow it?
That you do whatever you feel like in the moment. That’s how you typically work?
Or do you not see it as a problem? Or do you think that’s how you work best?
Or is it a few of them?
Because how we solve for it, if you want to solve for it, depends on the reason behind you doing it.
If it’s a lack of planning reason, the solution is simple – we plan ahead of time, always. We always know what we are meant to be doing in the moment, so we are never deciding there and then between what is urgent, what is important, what should be done now, what should be done next?
Notice I said simple. I didn’t say easy. You might have thoughts about planning that make it particularly hard. You might have resistance to planning. You might think you don’t have the time to plan. You might not know how to plan. You might have not decided upon some aspects of your business strategy yet. So you might not know what the priorities are. And of course, these are all things that I can help you with if you want support with them. Depending on what stage you’re at in your business, and what you are most struggling with – the productive quarter, time Masters or the School Hours Only mastermind are open to enroll into. You can book a free call with me to figure out which is the right one for you. I’ll pop a link in the show notes to book it with me.
But if you are able to plan, then planning what do you are going to work on and when, will help you stop task switching, if that’s the reason you currently do it.
If, however, the reason behind you finding yourself task-switching all the time, is that even though you’ve made a plan for your week, you end up not following it, then the solution to stopping task switching for you is gonna be found in the reason why you don’t follow the plan.
Is it because other people interrupt your plan and you’re often left unable to follow the original plan and so you don’t know what to do in the moment and then you’re relying on your “in the moment” brain to decide. Because if this is the case we want to first look at why other people have the power to interrupt your schedule. And what we could do about that. If it’s people pleasing, we can work on the strategies and mindset to help you not do that anymore. If it’s a lack of boundaries or communication, we can fix that too. If the interruptions are a result of poor planning, we can strategise for that too or if it’s that you’ve got little ones at home because they fell sick at nursery or school and you either don’t have another option for their care or you want to be looking after them but this disrupts your schedule and your left with some random hours which do not make sense for your plan, then a simple strategy like having both a Plan A for when the kids are in school, and a Plan B for what to do when they are home sick, can be so helpful so that even if your first plan goes off track you always know what to do in the moment when you switch to Plan B.
Now if the reason was that you just typically work by deciding what you feel like doing in the moment then we want to first question is that really working well for you? And if it’s not then we want to develop a new way of working which will involve having a plan and then having the skill sets to follow the plan. Of not giving in to urges to do easier things or more pleasant things. Of not doing everything in your power to escape uncomfortable emotions. It will involve looking at why you’re avoiding certain things, looking at your resistance to certain things and uncovering unhelpful patterns and anxieties and fears around what your plan says you should be doing.
If the reason for your task-switching, was that it’s just a lack of awareness to this being a problem then I want you to do this exercise. I want you to get a timer, a piece of paper and a pen and I want you to time yourself writing down the numbers 1 to 26 consecutively as fast as you can 1234 5678 910 all the way to 26 stop the timer and then set the timer again but this time do it with the alphabet ABCDEFG up to Z, write that down as fast as you can and time yourself doing it. And then add up those two times. And then I want you doing the following exercise of writing down 1A,2B,3C,4D etcetera all the way as fast as you can, and time yourself doing that.
The spoiler here is that despite the fact that you know the numbers, you know the alphabet off the back of your hand, it’s not a complex task, it’s not a difficult task to combine them… When you combine them, that task will take you longer to complete. More than two times longer than doing them individually and it’s because your brain is switching between thinking about one thing and thinking about another thing. Which takes time and energy to do. Now this is just a very small example but it for sure represents what your brain is doing when you switch tasks between email writing and research. Between responding to a client and creating an online shopping list.
So task-switching always requires more brain energy and more time, than focusing on a single task at a time. So it’s less efficient.
Becoming aware of this truth is the first part of the solution to you stopping task-switching where you currently don’t have the awareness that it’s a problem. So if you still aren’t sure that it makes a difference to the efficiencies of getting things done – time yourself doing multiple different tasks, and then as an experiment with yourself, make a plan to focus on each one, one at a time, and time those efforts too. So you can see for yourself. And then every time your brain tries to avoid planning, or tries to get you not following the plan, or doing a bit of everything in one work session, remind yourself of the extra time it takes. Of the inefficiencies.
Okay, and then the last reason is that you may be unaware that it’s a problem but you’re also in a little bit of denial too. That not only do you think it’s not slower to task-switch. But that you believe that actually it is quicker and more efficient if you work this way. You believe that you’re actually multitasking instead of task-switching. That you are capable of multi-tasking. You have the capacity to do that. Now there is a ton of evidence out there to suggest that the only way our brains can do two tasks at the exact same time, is if one of them is a fairly routine or mundane task that we can do with very little conscious thought – so pretty much on autopilot. And whilst our default mode network (the parts of our brain able to allow us to do that) is working on that task, we are able to engage in one other singular task that requires a little more conscious awareness. We are not, however, able to engage in two tasks that both require cognition, thinking. We are also not able to be in two places at once. Working on two separate tabs at once. Writing two emails at once. Creating a worksheet in canva and also filling our shopping list out for the week.
What we are doing when we are attempting to do those things, is not multi-tasking. It is switching back and forth between the tasks. And just like the exercise I gave you above demonstrates, this is wildly inefficient. It requires more brain energy to switch between the tasks in order to complete them than it does to do them individually one at a time, in series. It also takes you time usually to switch between them. Just to find that other tab takes a few seconds. To get your head in the right place with each switch. And not only that, but every time you switch, you are preventing yourself from getting into flow with that particular task – because flow follows focus, and focus demands your full attention – not split attention every few minutes across multiple things. And when you are in flow you can achieve up to a 500% increase in your productivity.
So it isn’t more efficient. And no, you are not the only special human who can multitask on two tasks requiring cognition at the same time. Even if you are a woman.
One of my clients shared with me last week that there is no scientific evidence that there is a difference between men and women when it comes to multi-tasking. Neither of them can do it. And I can’t remember who’s idea this was, but she shared that there is an opinion out there that not only is it a myth, but to think that women can multi-task fuels the existing and unhelpful societal beliefs and pressures that we are still facing today, where the women will typically juggle more, because she supposedly can, which lets men off the hook from sharing the load more.
Now I think that’s an interesting idea. It’s certainly something to think about.
I would say though, that sometimes when we are thinking of multitasking and women being better at it, we are actually referring to task-switching. Or to doing one thing, and then that thing happening and making progress without us, whilst we are doing something else, and then us coming back to the original thing.
For example, if I am wanting to cook pasta and clean the kitchen. It makes sense to fill a pan with water and put it on the hob. And then whilst that is heating up, move on to emptying the dishwasher. And then once it is boiling, add the pasta. And then go back to the kitchen cleaning.
This is task switching – not multi-tasking. True multi-tasking would be washing up, and having a conversation. Driving somewhere and listening to a podcast. Showering and problem-solving.
So the pasta making and kitchen cleaning is task-switching. But it’s effective task-switching. It’s not sitting around waiting for the pasta to cook and then once it’s done, moving on to do the dishwasher.
And I don’t know if women are naturally better at this, or if they just get more practice, or if it is because they believe they are (our capacity is directly related to what we believe we are capable of, afterall) or if they aren’t better than men at this at all.
But in my household, I would argue that I am definitely able to switch between tasks more efficiently than my other half. Particularly with regard to household chores. Maybe that’s because I can remember that I’ve got a pan boiling on the hob and he gets distracted – who knows.
But when it comes to doing two cognitive tasks at the same time, in my business – my brain is just as useless as doing that, as my partner’s. And so will yours be too.
So when you come to accept that switch-tasking is what you are doing (not multi-tasking), and you can see it is more inefficient and slower than doing the tasks separately with focus, you are much more likely going to stop, or at least, attempt to do it less.
So those are the reasons, and the solutions to try to reduce task-switching down in the first place.
But let’s just say you do catch yourself in a one-off task-switching moment. You catch yourself in the moment flitting between tasks and you want to stop.
The strategy you can use and that I use when I recognise I’m switch tasking is as follows.
You pause. And you take a deep breath in through your nose. And then at the end of the inhale, you take a second suck of air in, til your lungs are absolutely bursting they are so full. And then you sigh – do a slow audible exhale out your mouth – a deep physiological sigh til you are completely empty. And then you do it again.
This is the absolute quickest way to get your nervous system calmed down and regulated. And out of that panicked, reactive, activated, flighty state that switch-tasking gets you in.
Then you’re going to grab a piece of paper and pen.
And you are going to write down a list of the things you have spent the last 30 minutes attempting to do. All the things you have started, then switched on to something else.
Once they are on paper. You are going to attempt to put them in order. The order that makes most sense – what should get done first. Then second. Then third. Number them.
Make each task so specific and simple, you are able to follow it to a T.
And then you work down the list. Doing the first ONE until it’s done. And then moving on to the next one.
And any time you are tempted to start something new, or deviate from the list – you are going to stick to the list, you are going to make sure the new thing is on the list, you are going to remind yourself what number it is, and reassure yourself that you will get to it when you get to it, and you are going to repeat the mantra – ONE til it’s DONE.
I used this the other week – I had just put my daughter to bed, and come down to the kitchen which was an absolute state. And I’d started unloading the dishwasher. Then thought I’m thirsty so started making myself a coffee. When I opened the fridge door to get the milk, I realised I needed to make my shopping list. So I grabbed my phone to do that, and then thought I need to meal plan first. So then I fired up my laptop to look up the recipes. And spotted an email from someone…so started responding to that…but then thought no I need to get the kitchen done first, so went back to clearing up, and then spotted I needed a new food waste bin bag, so went to grab that…you get the drift – 30 minutes later Ithe kitchen was still in chaos, my coffee still not made let alone drank, the shopping list had two things on it, the meal planner was still empty, the email was half written…and I was feeling massively overwhelmed, frustrated, frenetic, reactive, and like I’d made zero fulfilling progress – because I hadn’t.
So I paused, took some deep breaths, grabbed a piece of paper and pen, and wrote down in order – 1. Make coffee. Number 2 – Drink coffee whilst do dishwasher. Number 3 – Plan meals. Number 4 – finish shopping list…etc. And then I worked down the list – ONE til it’s done. Knowing it was all going to be done. It was all going to be fine.
It sounds so simple and juvenile. But I tell you it is so effective at keeping you on track when you are jumping from one thing to another to another. And it takes you literally seconds to do.
So try this next time you catch yourself switch-tasking. And do the work to reduce the number of times you find yourself doing it too.
That’s it for this week peeps.
I’ll see you next time.
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