The Silent Cost of Multitasking

Why juggling tasks is breaking your team more than you realize

Read Time: 5 minutes

You are in three tools, five chats, and two meetings at once.
You are updating a deck while checking Slack, while pretending to pay attention on Zoom.
You are doing your best.
But nothing is getting done.

Multitasking feels productive.
But in project management, it is often where the quality, clarity, and connection start to fall apart.

Let’s talk about why and how to fix it.

Why Multitasking Hurts Projects

Multitasking is not a badge of honor.

It is a warning sign:

✅ It splits attention: Context-switching reduces your team’s ability to focus and increases mistakes.
✅ It creates an illusion of impact: People look busy but accomplish less.
✅ It increases friction: When focus is fragmented, miscommunications spike and rework follows.
✅ It erodes trust: Missed follow-through and dropped threads make PMs look unreliable, even when the intent is good.

The Hidden Signals to Watch

Most teams will not tell you outright that multitasking is burning them out.

But here are the signs:

• Updates are vague or repeated across meetings
• Team members say yes to everything, then drop deliverables
• Conversations get derailed or postponed repeatedly
• People seem distracted, defensive, or withdrawn

If you are seeing these, the problem might not be a lack of motivation.
It might be mental overload.

How to Reset Team Focus

Some simple ways to refocus a scattered team:

✅ Prioritize the absolute priority. Stop saying everything is critical. Identify what moves the project forward this week. Say it out loud. Align the team around it.

✅ Reduce work-in-progress. Limit the number of active tickets or tasks assigned to each person. Utilize WIP limits to safeguard quality and minimize churn.

✅ Protect deep work. Block off “focus hours” where meetings and messages are discouraged. Model it yourself as a PM.

✅ Clarify communication. Don’t rely on constant pings. Use structured updates and fewer tools. People perform better when they are not always reacting.

💬 A PM in our community shared how he noticed his team was showing up tired and behind on deliverables despite putting in extra hours. He shifted standups to focus on blockers only, cut all nonessential meetings for two weeks, and set team-wide “quiet hours.” Velocity improved without anyone working more.

The Best PMs Model Focus

If you are scattered, your team will be too.
If you say yes to every ping, every request, every rabbit hole, you teach people to do the same.

Leadership is not about doing the most.
It is about creating space for what matters.

And that's how focus is rebuilt between the milestones.

👇 Your Turn

Have you had to lead when someone above you was unclear or missing?

👉 Share your story in the comments below or respond to this email.

You might be featured in an upcoming spotlight!