From Multitasking to Shared Mental Bandwidth

The Myth of Multitasking

I was reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari recently, and one line caught my attention. It said that multitasking was never designed for humans, it was a term invented for computers so that more than one program could run at once.

Humans don’t actually multitask. We switch from one task to another, and every switch comes with a cognitive cost. And then something struck me.
We’ve been calling women “great multitaskers” for as long as I can remember. Then there were many questions that came up for me:

- Have we unknowingly celebrated women for carrying an invisible mental load?
- Is this “skill” actually a survival strategy built over time, through necessity, not biology?
- Are women’s brains wired differently to handle more?

What it does show is that everyone pays a price when asked to switch tasks constantly. So maybe it’s time we stop glorifying multitasking and start talking about shared mental bandwidth.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you been praised for juggling too much? Or found ways to move away from it?