There is a premise in philosophy, coined by Immanuel Kant, called “The Categorical Imperative”. It’s a maxim used to help people understand which sort of actions and beliefs we choose to act or believe in. It goes like this: take a thought or decision and visualize what the world would be like if everyone thought or did that same thing all the time. For instance, let’s say you wanted to kill your boss. While this may feel like justice in your own extreme way, if we allow and let anyone do the same at any time, we would end up with a lot of homocides. That’s no bueno. However, if we change the action for that feeling into “Addressing concerns with your boss with HR in the room”. That would be a very productive categorically sufficient action to produce. Everyone should act in that way to create a more productive and collaborative world. The same thought experiment can be applied to pretty much anything, according to Kant. And you may be surprised what you discover when you do.
Multitasking is a very commonly coveted “skill” that has a strangely fast identification procedure. What I mean by that is we often point out when someone is incapable of focusing on multiple things at the same time. In an office setting, I’ve personally experienced the light shaming of not being able to recall a significant amount of details when catching up a manager on a series of different topics. It’s usually a disgruntled grimace meant to “encourage” people to do better. Or even the more familiar experience within family where one person doing one “something” like cleaning the dishes, looks up befuddled from an off topic request by someone else. But what if these little moments are not the result of superior reasoning, but something more darker that stems from a place of anxiety? More on that soon. For now, let’s focus on how this applies to a categorical imperative.
Let’s say you determine that multitasking should pass the categorical imperative test. That we all should encourage the development of multitasking for everyone. Seems like a reasonable notion. Besides, when you are not a good multitasker, you are usually shamed in some way shape or form for that property. But let’s take a look at what it is first, and then what has been discovered about it. The definition of multitasking Is admittedly quite broad. But we have a few definitions most of us could at least accept without too much debate:
American Psychological Association: Trying to perform two tasks at once, switching from one task to another, or doing two or more tasks in rapid succession.
Cognitive psychology (Koch et al.): A condition where mental processes for multiple tasks overlap in time.
Wikipedia: Splitting attention across more than one task or activity at the same time.
Merriam‑Webster: Performance of multiple tasks at one time (by a person).
One of the more fascinating definitions comes from Wikipedia. Wherein it specifically calls out a “splitting” of attention between tasks. The nuance of using this word perhaps highlights a lesser known aspect of multitasking. That there is a fragmentation of your overall focus inherent in this activity. Which is something we all could have potentially guessed if we gave it some thought, but what is happening in our heads that we not aware of? The science is shockingly consistent on this topic.
Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans (2001) – Classic task‑switching experiments showing that switching between tasks can cost up to about 40% of a person’s productive time, via executive “goal shifting” and “rule activation” bottlenecks.
https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking)
Yue et al. (2025, Nature Communications) – Ultrafast fMRI study showing a central processing bottleneck during multitasking; when two demanding tasks overlap, information is processed in a serial queue, so at least one task’s performance suffers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58228-0)
Digital multitasking and hyperactivity (2024, open‑access review/editorial) – Summarizes behavioral, EEG, and fMRI evidence that multitasking overloads working memory and cognitive control, impairing executive functions like planning, problem‑solving, sustained attention, and decision‑making, and reducing task performance efficiency.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11543232/)
Chronic media multitaskers and cognitive control (Stanford fMRI work; 2019 report) – Finds that heavy media multitaskers perform worse than light multitaskers on core cognitive control tasks, suggesting degraded executive control under chronic multitasking.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2018/10/decade-data-reveals-heavy-multitaskers-reduced-memory-psychologist-says)
It ain’t great. The findings consistently show that if you want to do multiple tasks at once, your overall net productivity goes down. But many of these studies also point out that multitasking “feels” productive despite proving to do the opposite. All brains come prepackaged with a sort of “factory of focus” called our executive function. And within this, there are two very dominant forces: an ability to integrate new knowledge and an ability to reject irrelevant knowledge. Most of its judgement for which info to consider and which to block out in the moment operates on a pretty subconscious level, but the effort it takes to reject distractions is monumental. Which is why it is so difficult to work on a task that requires some mental work with a dinging phone, distracting music, or a captivating TV show. If we truly want to be more productive, we shouldn’t make our own brains less effective. It’s like trying to merge on a highway with the A/C on full blast. The car will eventually get up to speed, but it’ll probably take much longer and cause the engine to really struggle.
But does this mean we should only do one thing at a time? Wouldn’t that take even longer to get things done? Not quite. This is where the other part of executive function taps in. Determining what to incorporate into our actions is just as important. Sometimes we can get so infatuated into a task that we end up obsessing about too many details and end up losing sight of the big picture. It’s the classic scenario I’ve seen of graphic designers focusing too much on making some title in a social post typographically perfect, all while the overall post is crowded, confusing, and forgettable. Knowing what information is important to integrate into our focused session is vital to productivity as well. If we realize that other parts of the project, goal, or intention we set are being neglected, we should incorporate that info, not reject it and pivot our efforts to prioritize what needs attention.
This is sometimes called a “flow state” by business gurus (or just normal scientists). Where we can pivot when we need to and block out distractions when we need to. One really clear example of this working is professional endurance racing. These races are hours on end even 24 hours like the infamous Les Mans race where drivers race through the night to test the mechanical and psychological durability humans are capable of. But if you turn your attention to the drivers themselves, you will rarely see a driver constantly frantic behind the wheel. The famous F1 driver Ayrton Senna once said,
“You need, more than anything, to have a very clear mind to understand exactly when to be aggressive, when to be calculating. When to give everything you have, when to hold everything you have for another opportunity. That is the difference between winning and losing”
Multitasking is the preverbal cluttering of your brain. Allowing more ideas and messages to come barging in sacrifices energy (that you only have so much of) and causes less productivity overall. I really hope we get to a point where we agree to set a categorical imperative to let our brains to exist without the anxiety of thinking we need to be doing a million things at once. Where we let each other focus and let ourselves focus not with intensity, but as my wife has said, with a “settled” sense of working.
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