The Performance of Productivity
The cursor blinks. It’s rhythmic, almost mocking-a tiny vertical bar of white light that marks the exact spot where my productivity went to die 47 minutes ago. I am currently ‘attending’ a Zoom meeting about quarterly projections that involve at least 107 separate spreadsheet cells, while simultaneously drafting a response to a high-priority email and trying to order a specific type of organic fertilizer for my backyard. My finger hovers over the ‘Mute’ button with the twitchy grace of a professional gambler. I am a god of efficiency. Or so I tell myself right until my name cuts through the static of my own divided attention like a shard of glass. ‘So, what do you think about the 7-page revision, Kai?’ Silence. My heart does a frantic 77-beat-per-minute skip. I scramble for the mouse. ‘Sorry, my connection flickered-could you repeat that?’ I’ve said this 7 times this month. It’s a performance, a cheap magic trick where the only person I’m successfully fooling is myself.
The Myth: Multitasking is high-tier efficiency.
We live in a culture that treats the ability to multitask as a high-tier character attribute, something to be listed on a resume right next to ‘team player’ and ‘proficient in Python.’ But if we’re honest-the kind of honesty that only comes after 17 hours of screen time and a looming deadline-multitasking doesn’t actually exist. It’s a neurological myth. What we are actually doing is rapid, violent task-switching. We are slamming our cognitive gears from first to fifth and back again, wondering why the engine is smoking and why we’ve only traveled 7 miles in two hours. The human brain is not a parallel processor; it’s a sequential one that’s been bullied into pretending it can handle 27 streams of data at once. The result isn’t a higher output; it’s a degraded reality where nothing gets our best, and everything gets our leftovers.
The Absent Body
I spent a significant portion of my morning rehearsing a conversation that never happened. I was standing in front of the coffee maker, and for 7 minutes, I was brilliantly defending my choice of font on a presentation to a colleague who wasn’t even there. I was so deep in this imaginary conflict that I didn’t even notice the coffee had finished brewing. This is the hallmark of the multitasking mind-it is never where the body is. It’s constantly 7 steps ahead or 17 steps behind, trying to manage the ‘next’ thing before the ‘current’ thing has even been acknowledged. We trade presence for a frantic, low-quality simulation of speed. We think we are saving time, but we are actually just spending our focus in 7-cent increments until we are cognitively bankrupt.
I think about Kai R. quite a bit. Kai is a cemetery groundskeeper I met 27 years ago when I was much younger and much louder. He’s a man who understands the weight of a single shovelful of damp earth. Kai is 57 now, and he moves with a deliberate, haunting slowness. He doesn’t wear earbuds when he works. He doesn’t check a smartwatch to see if he’s hit 10007 steps by noon. He simply digs. When he is pruning the hedges near the 1907 section of the graveyard, he is only pruning. If he tried to dig a grave while also trying to manage the groundskeeping schedule for the next 7 months in his head, he would fail at both. The hole would be crooked; the roses would be ragged. He told me once, while leaning on a rusted spade, that the dead don’t mind if you take your time, but the living will kill themselves trying to save a second they don’t even know how to use.
The Physical Toll of Fragmentation
There is a specific physical sensation to this mental fragmentation. It’s a pressure behind the eyes, a 7-pound weight that sits right on the bridge of the nose. It’s the feeling of 37 browser tabs open in the mind, each one demanding a sliver of RAM. When we switch from a complex task like writing a report to a simple task like checking a Slack notification, our brain doesn’t just instantly pivot. There is a ‘residue’ of the previous task that clings to us. If you check your phone 7 times an hour, you are never actually working at full capacity. You are living in the residue. You are a ghost haunting your own productivity.
We are a ghost haunting our own productivity.
I’ve tried to fight this by creating rituals. I turn off the notifications. I set a timer for 47 minutes and tell myself I will not look at anything else. But the pull of the ‘other’ is magnetic. We are addicted to the hit of dopamine that comes with a new notification. It feels like progress. It feels like being needed. But being needed by 7 different people on 7 different platforms at the same time is just a recipe for becoming a person who provides 7 different types of mediocre results. I recently caught myself trying to listen to a podcast at 2.7x speed while also reading a technical manual. I realized I wasn’t learning anything; I was just consuming noise. I was trying to optimize my brain as if it were a machine, forgetting that a machine can be replaced, but a nervous system cannot.
The Quantifiable Cost: IQ Drop
Neuroscience indicates that multitasking lowers functional IQ by approximately 17 points, a larger drop than severe sleep deprivation.
Functional Loss
Baseline Maintained
The Value of Presence
This obsession with doing more at once is a coping mechanism for being chronically overloaded. We are given the work of 7 people and told that if we just managed our time better-if we just found the right energy pouches vs coffee or the right app or the right standing desk-we could conquer the impossible. It’s a cultural delusion. We praise the ‘busy’ person, the one with 17 projects on their plate, but we rarely ask about the quality of their soul or the clarity of their thought.
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When I talk to Kai R. at the cemetery, he doesn’t ask me how many emails I sent. He asks me if I noticed the way the moss is growing on the north side of the 1887 headstones. He notices the 7 different shades of green in a single patch of grass. He has the one thing I am constantly trading away: a singular, unbroken focus.
– Kai R. (Implied Wisdom)
Neuroscience tells us that multitasking actually lowers your functional IQ by about 17 points in the moment. That’s a bigger drop than you get from losing a full night’s sleep. We are literally making ourselves stupider in the pursuit of appearing more capable. It’s a vanity project with a massive cost. I remember a day last month when I was trying to cook dinner, take a work call, and help my kid with a math problem involving 7-sided polygons. I ended up burning the garlic, forgetting the project deadline, and making my kid cry because I wasn’t actually listening to their question. I was there, but I was also 17 other places. I was a fragmented version of a father, a cook, and an employee. I was a 7% version of a human being.
The Un-Multitaskable Life
The tragedy is that the things that matter most-deep work, meaningful conversation, the quiet observation of a cemetery groundskeeper-cannot be done in parallel. You cannot multitask a relationship. You cannot multitask a sunset. You cannot multitask the grieving process or the creative process. These things require the whole of you, or they give you nothing back. We are so afraid of ‘missing out’ on the 777 digital signals we receive every hour that we miss out on the actual life happening in front of us. We are terrified of the silence that comes when we only do one thing, because in that silence, we might realize how much time we’ve wasted trying to be everywhere at once.
The Bucket With 7 Holes
We try to fill attention, but it drains through distraction.
Kai R. once found me sitting on a stone bench, staring at my phone while the sun was setting in a spectacular display of 7 different hues of violet and orange. He didn’t say much, he just pointed his muddy finger at the horizon and waited. He waited 7 minutes until I finally put the phone in my pocket. ‘It’ll still be there,’ he said, referring to the digital void. ‘But the light won’t.’ He was right. The light never is. We think we are capturing everything, but we are holding a bucket with 7 holes in the bottom. We are so busy trying to fill it that we don’t notice the water is gone before we even get home.
Path to Presence (17% Progress)
17%
Embrace The Singular Moment
I’m trying to change. It’s slow. It’s a 7-step process that feels more like 77 steps. I start by doing one thing for 17 minutes. Just one. If I am writing, I am only writing. If I am talking to my wife, I am not checking the score of the game. If I am walking, I am feeling the ground under my feet. It’s uncomfortable. It feels like a withdrawal. My brain screams for the distraction, for the 7 different tabs, for the feeling of being ‘busy.’ But then, something happens. The fog starts to lift. The 7-pound weight behind my eyes lightens. I start to see the 7 different shades of green that Kai talked about. I start to realize that the lie of multitasking wasn’t just about productivity; it was about avoiding the depth of my own life.
We don’t need more time; we need more presence. We don’t need to be faster; we need to be more deliberate. The next time you find yourself rehearsing a conversation that hasn’t happened while you’re supposed to be doing something else, stop. Breathe 7 times. Look at the one thing in front of you. It might be a spreadsheet, or a shovel, or a 7-year-old asking about polygons. Give it everything you have. The rest of the world can wait its turn. It has been waiting for 10007 years, and it will wait 7 minutes more. The only thing you’re actually missing by trying to do it all is the very thing you’re working so hard to protect: your own sanity.
Core Realizations:
Sequential Brain
Not parallel processor.
Presence > Speed
Focus is the true resource.
Depth Required
Relationships cannot be divided.
