![Screenshot 2026 02 19 at 11.55.03 PM] You've seen the graphic. Two bar charts, one labeled "Multitasking" and one labeled "Focus." The multitasking chart shows scattered, uneven progress across multiple tasks. The focus chart shows steady, sequential completion. The message is clear: stop juggling and start finishing.
I've been seeing versions of this for 20 years. And for most of those years, I believed it. The science backs it up. Context switching is expensive. The American Psychological Association pegs the cost at up to 40% of productive time. Your prefrontal cortex burns energy every time it shifts gears, and the result is slower work, more mistakes, and faster burnout.
But here's the thing. That research was built on a world where you were the one doing all the cognitive work. You were writing the report, analyzing the data, drafting the email, and building the deck. Of course multitasking destroyed your output. You were the bottleneck, and splitting your attention made the bottleneck worse.
That world is changing.
The Shift from Executor to Orchestrator
In AI-powered knowledge work, your role is shifting. You're spending less time as the person doing the work and more time as the person directing the work. You prompt an AI to draft a document while you review the output of another AI that just analyzed a dataset. You kick off three parallel workstreams and check back in when each one surfaces a result for your review.
This isn't the old version of multitasking, where your brain was trying to hold two complex threads at once. This is orchestration. You're managing a portfolio of work products that are being generated in parallel, and your job is to set direction, evaluate quality, and make decisions.
The neuroscience hasn't changed. Your brain still can't write two emails at the same time. But you're not writing two emails anymore. You're reviewing one AI-drafted email while another agent runs a competitive analysis in the background. The cognitive demand is different.
Where Focus Still Wins
This doesn't mean focus is dead. It means focus applies differently now.
When you're crafting the strategy behind a client engagement, you need deep, uninterrupted thought. When you're making a judgment call about which AI output is actually good enough to ship, that requires real attention. When you're having a conversation with a stakeholder about what matters most to their business, multitasking will absolutely destroy that interaction.
The work that requires focus has shifted upstream. It's less about production and more about judgment, framing, and intent. Those are exactly the things AI can't do for you, and they still require your full attention.
The New Skill: Knowing When to Switch Modes
The old advice was simple: focus on one thing at a time. The new reality is more nuanced. You need to know when to go deep and when to go wide.
Going deep means carving out uninterrupted time for the work that only you can do. Strategy, relationship building, quality judgment, creative direction. These tasks still follow the old rules. Splitting your attention here costs you.
Going wide means running parallel workflows where AI handles the execution and you handle the orchestration. Kicking off multiple agent tasks, reviewing outputs, making corrections, and moving pieces forward across several workstreams at once. This is a legitimate way to work now, and it can be remarkably productive when done well.
The danger is confusing the two. If you try to orchestrate when you should be focusing, your strategic thinking gets shallow. If you try to focus when you could be orchestrating, you're leaving massive productivity on the table.
What This Means for Teams
This shift has real implications for how we think about productivity in organizations. The old model rewarded deep individual focus, and rightfully so. But AI-enabled teams need people who can do both. They need operators who know when to put their head down on a single problem and when to spin up five AI-assisted workstreams and manage them in parallel.
The teams that figure this out will have a serious advantage. Not because they're working more hours, but because they're working at a different level. They're spending their focused time on the decisions that matter and using AI to handle the volume of everything else.
The Real Question
The classic focus vs. multitasking debate assumed you were the one doing all the work. That assumption is breaking down. The question isn't whether focus beats multitasking. The question is: what deserves your focus now that AI can handle so much of the execution?
Get that answer right, and you'll outperform anyone who's still thinking about productivity the old way.