Multitasking has become one of those things we criticize while quietly admiring it.
The person who can answer Slack, listen to a meeting, order groceries, scan an email, and remember the school pickup schedule seems impressively capable. In a crowded life, keeping several balls in the air can look like competence.
But I wondered about the moments when we’re not simply clearing small tasks. What happens when we’re trying to make a choice that requires comparison, judgment, and a little patience?
Choosing a job. Reading the fine print before signing something. Deciding whether a conflict is worth raising. Looking at two treatments, two schools, two financial options, two possible next steps.
Can multitasking make us worse at deciding, even when it makes us feel busy and effective?
First, a small correction: we usually aren’t doing two thinking tasks at once
There are a few things people can genuinely combine. Walking and talking, for example. Folding laundry while listening to a familiar podcast. Much of that works because one activity is relatively automatic.
Two tasks that both demand attention are different. More often, we’re switching between them. The switch may be so fast that it feels simultaneous, but our attention has moved.
That distinction sounds picky until you look at what researchers have repeatedly found in task-switching experiments: after a switch, people tend to respond more slowly and make more errors than when they repeat the same task. Even having time to prepare reduces that cost without fully removing it. A review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences described these switch costs as a consistent feature of the research, not a personal failing or proof that someone lacks discipline.
That’s the basic problem. A decision is rarely just one mental act. It involves holding the question in mind, deciding what matters, comparing alternatives, noticing what does not fit, and sometimes changing your mind because you saw something you missed the first time.
Every interruption doesn’t erase all of that. But it can break the sequence.
The most consequential moment may be the one we interrupt
Here’s where it gets interesting. Not every part of decision-making appears equally vulnerable.
In an experiment published in Human Factors, participants completed a complex procurement task involving problem identification, generating alternatives, and evaluating and selecting among them. The researchers interrupted different groups at different phases.
The group interrupted during evaluation and selection performed worse overall. Yet they did not necessarily feel worse about being interrupted. Some participants reported positive feelings about the interruptions and remained confident in their performance.
I find that gap hard to ignore.
We often use subjective experience as our scoreboard. If I answered the message quickly, returned to the decision, and still feel clear-headed, I may assume the interruption was harmless. But feeling recovered isn’t the same as having preserved the reasoning that was underway.
A good decision sometimes depends on staying with the uncomfortable middle long enough to see a tradeoff. Which option sounds appealing but creates a problem later? What information am I discounting because it’s inconvenient? Is the urgent thing actually the important thing?
Those aren’t always questions that survive a quick detour.
Being able to switch is useful. Living in switch mode is something else.
I don’t want to turn this into a romantic argument for uninterrupted silence. Life requires flexibility. Parents, clinicians, managers, caregivers, and people doing public-facing work often cannot simply disappear into an hour of single-tasking. Sometimes an interruption contains information that truly cannot wait.
The capacity to shift attention when circumstances change is part of functioning well. It is not the enemy.
But flexibility and constant availability are not the same thing. In fact, recent work reviewing task-switching research treats focus and readiness to switch as related but distinct parts of cognitive control. A person can be responsive without being endlessly interruptible. At least, those are not identical abilities.
And there’s another wrinkle: we may not reliably choose the best moment to switch. In a study designed around email work and chat-message interruptions, participants often switched during delays in their main task. That choice made them slower, and they frequently forgot information from the email task after switching.
That feels familiar. When a hard decision reaches the point where I need to wait, think, or tolerate uncertainty, another task can become strangely attractive. The interruption may be external. Sometimes I’m the one creating it.
What counts as a worse decision?
This is where I’d be careful not to oversell laboratory research. Choosing between options in an experimental task is not the same as deciding whether to move across the country or leave a long relationship. Real decisions come with values, history, emotion, other people, and consequences that cannot be reduced to a performance score.
Still, laboratory studies can expose a useful assumption: that because we can resume a decision, we resume it with the same information, priorities, and level of scrutiny.
Maybe the meaningful cost of multitasking is not that every choice becomes obviously bad. Maybe it is more ordinary than that. We overlook one condition in a contract. We choose the familiar option because we no longer have the thread for comparison. We respond to the loudest input rather than the most relevant one. We make a choice quickly enough to feel relieved, but not slowly enough to know what we gave up.
That can affect work, money, relationships, and the quieter architecture of a life. Judgment is not only about intelligence. It also depends on whether there is enough continuity to notice what matters before the next demand arrives.
A better question than “Can I handle it?”
Most of us can handle a great deal. That may be exactly why multitasking is so persuasive. We answer the message, return to the document, make the appointment, remember the detail. Nothing visibly falls apart.
But “Can I keep moving?” is a different question from “What kind of thinking does this decision require?”
Some choices need speed. Some need responsiveness. Some need a broad view of competing demands. And some need an unbroken stretch of attention, not because uninterrupted focus is morally superior, but because the decision itself asks us to compare, revise, and see beyond the next notification.
The question I’m left with is less about whether multitasking is good or bad. It’s this: when something will shape my work, my relationships, or my next move, have I given the decision enough continuity for my judgment to show up?