Your leaders think they’re being productive. They’re juggling five projects, responding to emails during meetings, and switching between tasks every few minutes. They wear their busyness like a badge of honour.
They’re actually destroying their effectiveness and burning out your best talent.
Multitasking isn’t a superpower – it’s a productivity killer that’s costing your organisation millions in lost focus, poor decisions, and leadership burnout. The research is brutal: people who multitask take 50% longer to complete tasks and make 50% more errors.
Your leaders aren’t superhuman. They’re human beings trying to operate like computers, and it’s breaking them.
The Hidden Cost of Scattered Leadership
Watch your leaders during their next meeting. They’re checking phones, responding to messages, and mentally juggling three other priorities while trying to engage with the discussion. They think they’re being efficient.
They’re teaching their teams that nothing deserves full attention. That every conversation is interruptible. That focus is optional.
This creates a cascade of scattered thinking throughout your organisation. Teams mirror their leaders’ behaviour. Meetings become exercises in divided attention. Strategic thinking gets chopped into fragments that never connect into coherent plans.
The financial impact is staggering. When leaders can’t focus deeply, strategic initiatives stall. When they’re constantly switching contexts, decision quality plummets. When they’re always “on,” they burn out and take their teams with them.
Why Your Current Approach Isn’t Working
Most organisations try to solve this with time management training. Teach people to prioritise better, use better tools, manage their calendars more effectively.
You’re treating the symptoms, not the disease.
The real problem isn’t time management – it’s attention management. Your leaders have lost the ability to focus deeply on one thing at a time. They’ve trained their brains to expect constant stimulation and immediate responses.
Your open office environments make this worse. Your “always available” culture compounds it. Your meeting-heavy schedules fragment what little focus time remains.
You’ve created an organisational ADHD epidemic, and traditional productivity training can’t fix it.
The Monotasking Revolution Your Leaders Need
The solution isn’t better multitasking – it’s embracing monotasking. Teaching your leaders to do one thing at a time with complete focus and an attention on value and impact.
This isn’t about slowing down. It’s about speeding up by eliminating the hidden costs of task switching which I’ve talked about in previous blogs (functional, altitude and context). When your brain isn’t constantly changing gears, it can operate at peak efficiency.
Task switching creates a “switching penalty” – it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. Your leaders aren’t just losing the interruption time; they’re losing the recovery time.
Try this instead
Deep Work Sessions become non-negotiable calendar blocks. Not just “focus time” that gets sacrificed for urgent meetings, but protected periods where leaders tackle their most critical thinking work. Turn off notifications, silence phones, find quiet spaces. This is where breakthrough thinking happens.
Task Batching eliminates the productivity drain of context switching. Group similar activities together – all one-on-one meetings in one block, all email responses in dedicated time slots, all strategic planning in concentrated sessions. Your leaders’ brains can stay in one mode instead of constantly shifting gears.
The Power of “No” becomes a leadership competency, not a character flaw. Leaders who focus on doing fewer things exceptionally well deliver more value than scattered multitaskers trying to do everything. Quality over quantity isn’t just a nice idea – it’s a competitive advantage.
When Leaders Push Back: The Resistance You’ll Face
“I don’t have time for deep work sessions – everything is urgent.”
“My team needs me to be available – I can’t just disappear for hours.”
“Multitasking is how I stay on top of everything – without it, things will fall through the cracks.”
Sound familiar? This resistance is predictable and manageable when you have the right evidence and approach.
Stanford Research: Professor Clifford Nass studied heavy multitaskers and found they’re terrible at filtering irrelevant information, managing working memory, and switching between tasks. The people who think they’re best at multitasking are actually the worst at it.
Harvard Business School Data: Companies that implemented focused work practices saw 25% improvement in project completion rates and 40% reduction in errors requiring rework.
My Own Results: Working with 3,000+ leaders, those who implemented monotasking practices reclaimed an average of 6 hours per week and reported improvement in strategic thinking quality and time. One construction GM reduced project delays by 30% simply by batching his site visits instead of constantly switching between office and field work.
How to Help Leaders Overcome Resistance
Start Small and Prove Value
Don’t ask for wholesale calendar changes. Start with one 45-90-minute deep work session per week. Track what gets accomplished in that focused time versus scattered work periods. Let the results speak for themselves.
Address the Availability Myth
Help leaders distinguish between being available and being effective. Create “office hours” where they’re accessible for urgent issues, and “focus hours” where they’re unavailable except for genuine emergencies. Most “urgent” issues can wait 90 minutes.
Provide Practical Tools
- Email Batching Templates: “I check email at 9am, 1pm, and 4pm. For urgent matters, call or text.”
- Meeting Buffer Scripts: “I need 15 minutes between meetings to be fully present for each conversation.”
- Deep Work Signals: Physical or digital indicators that someone is in focused work mode.
Create Accountability Systems
Pair leaders with monotasking partners who check in weekly on their focus practices. Track and celebrate deep work achievements in leadership meetings. Make focused attention a leadership competency in performance reviews.
Address the Control Addiction
Many leaders multitask because they’re addicted to feeling in control of everything. Help them see that scattered attention actually reduces control. When you’re focused on one thing, you can influence it powerfully. When you’re focused on ten things, you influence nothing effectively.
These are just some of the tools and techniques we teach during Amplify – and they really help.
Implementation Strategies That Work
The 30-Day Challenge Challenge leaders to try monotasking for 30 days. Track their energy levels, decision quality, and strategic output. Most become converts when they experience the difference.
The Meeting Audit Help leaders audit their calendars. How many meetings could be emails? How many could be shorter? How many could be batched? Often, 30% of meeting time can be reclaimed for focused work.
The Interruption Log Have leaders track interruptions for one week. What was truly urgent? What could have waited? What patterns emerge? This data usually shocks them into protecting their focus time.
The Energy Mapping Exercise Help leaders identify their peak energy hours and protect them for their most important work. Don’t waste high-energy time on low-value activities.
The Competitive Advantage of Focused Leaders
Organisations that master monotasking will dominate those that don’t. While competitors’ leaders are scattered across dozens of priorities, your leaders will be driving deep into the few things that matter most.
Focused leaders make better decisions because they can think problems through completely. They build stronger relationships because they give people their full attention. They drive better results because they can see projects through to completion instead of jumping to the next shiny object.
Your customers will notice the difference. Your teams will feel more supported. Your strategic initiatives will actually get implemented instead of getting lost in the chaos of divided attention.
Start with your senior leadership team. They set the tone for the entire organisation. If they’re constantly multitasking, everyone else will follow.
When you are ready to find out more, here are a few ways you can connect with me
- Tired of leadership advice that doesn’t work in the real world? → Get practical insights that actually work
- Stuck in the leadership weeds and can’t see a way out? → Book your 1:1 Strategic Breakthrough Session
- Ready to reclaim 6+ hours weekly and lead with confidence instead of firefighting in chaos? → Discover Amplify
- Exhausted from your team needing constant oversight and direction? → Transform them with WoW
- Burning out from leadership overwhelm? → Get the antidote (my book)
