In the business world, if we were lucky, we started from doing things we love. Then, we thought about it too much, and we started to multitask without knowing it.
For others, probably people working in corporate, doing multitasks isn’t an option. Lots of companies are downsizing for cost optimization to survive in today’s market, ending up with very frustrated workers having to do lots of work which they didn’t ask for.
Lots of tasks ended up bringing no value back to the company, because the people in charge of it simply don’t have the time to spend understanding and actually doing it. This is the clearest consequence of staff unwilling to multitask.
So how do we manage? How do we manage tons of workloads with little time? Let’s walk through this article with me to understand the nature of multitasking and how to navigate our times to properly do effective multitasking.
What is multitasking?
Multitasking is the act of performing more than one task or activity at the same time. While people often use the word to describe doing several things at once, the human brain typically achieves this by rapidly switching attention between tasks, rather than processing them simultaneously. (According to Sciencedirect)
In my opinion, a person cannot truly think of more than one task at once, their brain just switches context. The speed of switching context actually depends on the level of that person understanding the project, supported by their experience and expertise with the project nature.
A person doing Business can find it very difficult to have a qualification in Nursing, even if they spend lots of time with it.
When a businessman does the job of an automotive engineer
Switching between industry perspectives is tough for the human brain. But with an adaptable mindset and a solid methodology, professionals can view their work as a plug-and-play pipeline, making cross-industry transitions seamless.
Case: You’re an owner of an automotive firm, and you’re thinking about onboarding business talent to your engineering team.
Your method: Input > Process > Output
What you do: Hiring a business expert > Train him > Get him to join MKT, Customer Service > Get him to join the product team to get more perspective > Get him to think about the business question > His product outputs (proposal, marketing strategy, business direction…)
But, you cannot force him to learn how to architect a car. Architecting a car takes time for lots of reasons like physics, maths and of course vehicle safety. If you input a businessman to be an automotive engineer, your product line will break down. Your talent doesn’t have time or skill to think like an engineer, he knows business well, that’s his strength.
Businessmen need to make fast decisions, their focus is business growth. Engineers need their cars to run safely.
Multitasking in this case only gives migraines, nothing more!
| Dimension | The Business Lens | The Engineering Lens |
| Primary Goal | Market velocity, growth, and ROI | Safety, structural integrity, and precision |
| Risk Tolerance | High (“Fail fast, pivot faster”) | Zero (“Failure means catastrophic physical risk”) |
| Decision Speed | Immediate, instinctual, and market-driven | Deliberate, calculated, and evidence-based |
When do multitasks actually work?
Multitasks ONLY work when ALL of your workloads share the same nature. If you’re working in Marketing, you can expand your work to operation and customer servicing, as the expanded work should relate closely to your primary expertise!
Reasons why it works
- Shared language: To some extent, Marketing shares the same vocabulary with customer services, in this case: Customer pain points. When doing customer service (CS) works, you have to hear those exact pain points everyday. When you move to work in operation, your tasks are to figure out how to deliver the product to solve those pain points faster. The core entity, the customer and the value proposition, never changes, and it’s been shared as major issues across departments.
- Symbiotic Inputs: What you learn in CS becomes instant input for advertisement work. What you optimize in operations becomes the process that allows Marketing faster delivery.
- Unified KPI: At the end of the day, all three functions are pulling in the same direction: driving growth, retaining users, and ensuring a smooth user journey. Your brain therefore doesn’t need to switch context, because the KPIs are identical!
Quiet momentum of getting things done
Still, it’s very difficult to get started with multitasks, especially for those who don’t have a choice… You are not willing to do it at all, so how do you force your mind to do it?
It is now time for ‘Nhân trần’ – A Vietnamese herbal tea.
You came to work at 9… You figured something right at around 1pm, then your adrenaline was high. You had another bite of boiled sweet potato, and kept on doing what you do.
Then your back started to hurt. That’s when you realized you should go home…
I mean the logic here is when you complete task by task, then you realize the tangle starts to get untangled by every minor step.
For around 1 month or 2, you start to realize you actually learn something valuable and can apply it to your personal life. That’s learning, and that’s what happens when you get things done.
So, the keys for the multitasks process are:
- Your starts should come from something personal, don’t start with complex big or professional words; just ask yourself with simple questions like: what are those? Why do they exist? How do they link with your knowledge/ dictionary?
- Step by step, but the steps have to be yours, not the generic guide you got off the internet. The reason here is that you have to understand the steps when doing things. Following others isn’t working for me.
- Define your targets, but they should be flexible, as you can change them according to your learning process.
- Have your boss define his final goal for you. He knows the business best, he is an ‘outsider’ of your job, and he’s allowed to ask ‘stupid’ questions. A smart system should be able to answer stupid questions.
- Understand the task nature, you should always remember them when doing that task, don’t let it fade away.
Multitasking and time management – Manage multiple projects at once
Time is limited, since we all have only 24 hours a day. Excluding time to eat, clean, travel and sleep, we only have around 8 to 10 hours of work. Still, your brain is clouded and you don’t know where to start with a huge tangled workload right in front of you:
Group the project by nature
Group projects by “nature,” not by deadline. Batch the ones sharing the same database together; those should run in the same mental session; where you can continuously think about a single object.
Agree on the final output up front, not your thinking process
The boss needs to look at the final process and product, but not your working process. Having a micromanagement boss in this case is chaos, he will be concerned at every minor step you’re doing! This is not about a right or wrong question, but about delivering the final product with high quality and solid rationale behind it.
Define a shared “core entity”
In a business sense, the customer never changes. Therefore, for every project on your plate, name the one entity they all serve, if you realize that the core identities are diverse, add more people into your project, do not multitasks in this case.
Schedule to have a break
Break time is born for a reason, it’s there for you to reset your mindset, even in between relevant projects.
When we physically move or mentally learn, neurons fire electrical and chemical signals across pathways, then they also need rest. When the brain is tired, it just cannot send appropriate signals. A 5 to 10 minute break is quick and painless, why not spend those 10 minutes having refreshing drinks?
Steamed sweet potatoes make the ultimate workspace snack, for people trying to manage their weight or balance their blood sugar levels during a hectic day.
Define your process with your own words
To truly define your process, you must reject generic internet checklists and rephrase every step in your own words until you deeply understand it. You need to establish flexible targets that are entirely your own, allowing them to bend and adapt as your learning evolves.
4 productivity tools in 2026
No tool will make you multitask across two different natures. What good tools can do in 2026 is cut the switching cost, the seconds and the mental friction you lose every time you jump between tasks. The best ones keep your work in one place so your brain isn’t the thing holding it all together. Here are the four tools I actually use:
Notion – Your writing notes
If your projects share a nature, they should share a home, and Notion is that home. Notes, docs, tasks, and databases all live in one workspace, so you stop hunting across five apps for the one thing you half-remember writing down.
Its built-in AI can summarize a long page, pull out action items, or turn a messy brain-dump into a clean plan. Use it as the place where your “core entity”, the customer, the value proposition, whatever never changes across your projects… is written down once and referenced everywhere.
Trello – Your personal task management
When you’re juggling several things, the first thing you lose is the overview. Trello fixes that with the simplest idea in productivity: cards moving across columns, To Do → Doing → Done.
There’s almost nothing to learn, which is exactly the point, it’s for the person who’s overwhelmed and just needs to see where each project sits without setting up a system first. This is your “untangle it step by step” tip made visual: every card you drag to Done is one knot loosened.
Jira – Your team workspace
Once projects grow teeth, dependencies, sprints, handoffs between people, Trello starts to buckle and you want Jira. It’s built for tracking real delivery across a team, and in 2026 its AI assistant (Rovo) can summarize a backlog, write issues in plain language, and flag work that’s drifting off track before a deadline actually slips.
It’s heavier than the others, so reach for it only when the complexity earns it, but when it does, nothing keeps a multi-project pipeline honest like Jira.
A Pomodoro timer – To organize ‘you’
The first three organize the work; this one organizes you. A Pomodoro timer breaks your day into focused sprints, usually 25 minutes on, 5 off, so you commit to one task at a time instead of pretending to do three.
Pomofocus is perfect if you just want a clean timer and nothing else; Forest is better if you need a little accountability, since it grows a virtual tree while you focus and kills it if you bail. This is the practical answer to the hardest part of the article, getting started when you don’t want to. You don’t have to feel like doing the whole project. You only have to survive the next 25 minutes.
