You are on a client call, with email open on the second monitor and a chat window blinking in the corner. You nod, you type, you “just quickly” answer a message. Ten minutes later you realize you’ve missed the thing the client just said.
When you work for yourself, nobody else enforces your focus. There’s no office door to close or manager to run interference. You’re the receptionist, the accountant and the person who does the actual work. The temptation to juggle is constant. The trouble is that the juggling tends to cost more than it gives.
What the research says about multitasking
Let’s separate the folklore from the findings.
The American Psychological Association summarizes decades of lab work on this question. Its overview notes that when people switch between tasks, they lose time on every switch, and those losses grow when the tasks are complex or unfamiliar. In studies by Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans, young adults switched between tasks like solving math problems and classifying shapes. They were slower each time they switched, and the penalty got larger as the tasks got harder.
Each individual switch can be tiny, sometimes only a few tenths of a second. But in real work we switch hundreds of times a day, and the same APA overview quotes Meyer’s estimate that these mental shifts “can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.” Notably, the APA doesn’t tie that figure to a single experiment, so treat it as a rough, expert estimate, not a precise number.
Then there’s the interruption problem. Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, led a workplace study in which observers shadowed information workers at high-tech companies for about three and a half days each and logged their activities. She reported that after an interruption it took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the original task. That figure comes from a specific group of office workers in a particular era, so don’t assume it applies to you to the minute. But the direction of the finding, that coming back to work is slower than leaving it, matches most people’s experience.
The practical conclusion is not that you must never do two things at once. Walking while listening to a podcast is fine. The problem is two tasks that both need thinking. For those, you are not multitasking. You are switching rapidly, and paying a toll every time.
Why solo owners are especially exposed
- Every role is yours. A sales email, an invoice and a deliverable are all competing for the same brain.
- Urgency feels like importance. A ping from a client feels pressing. The proposal that would bring in next quarter’s income doesn’t ping at all.
- No one is watching. The cost of distraction is invisible until the deadline arrives.
- Work is always within reach. Phone, laptop and inbox are always on, so the day never has natural borders.
Practical ways to focus on one thing
1. Pick the one thing before you start
Each morning (or the night before) write down the single most important task for the day. Not ten tasks. One. If you do that and nothing else, it was a good day. Everything else is a bonus.
2. Work in blocks
Set a timer for 25 to 90 minutes and work on one task only. Choose a length that matches your attention span and the work. Short blocks suit routine tasks, longer ones suit writing, design or code. When the timer rings, take a real break: stand up, drink water, look out a window. Not your inbox.
3. Batch the shallow stuff
Email, invoicing, scheduling, and small admin tasks do not need your best hours. Handle them in two or three set windows. Tell clients your typical response time (“I reply to messages within one business day”) and urgent matters can use a phone call. Most “urgent” email isn’t.
4. Shrink the doorways
- Turn off notifications you don’t need: badges, banners, sounds.
- Put your phone in another room, or at least face down and silent.
- Close the tabs you aren’t using. A browser with 40 tabs is a to-do list that hasn’t been written down.
- Use “do not disturb” or a focus mode on your computer for blocks of deep work.
- Close your inbox or chat app while you work. If you must stay reachable, allow only specific people through.
5. Keep a “parking lot”
Mid-task, you’ll remember something: a call to make, an idea, a file to rename. Don’t act on it. Jot it on a notepad (paper works well) and go back to the work. The thought is saved, and you are not carrying it around in your head. Review the list at the end of the block.
6. Finish things
Half-finished tasks pull at your attention. Where you can, bring a task to a clean stopping point before moving on. If you must stop mid-way, write one line on where you left off and what the next step is. It makes returning dramatically easier.
7. Make meetings and calls single-purpose
If you’re on a call, be on the call. Close the other windows. Your clients can tell when you’re typing elsewhere, and what you missed will cost you later. If a call truly doesn’t need your full attention, ask yourself whether you should be on it at all.
8. Protect your best hours
Most people have a window in the day when their thinking is sharpest. Put your hardest or most valuable work there, and move the meetings and email to the rest of the day. Guard that window as you would a client appointment.
Use tools, but don’t let them become the distraction
Site blockers, focus timers, and notification schedules are all useful. So are AI assistants for drafting routine replies or summarizing long threads, because they can shrink the shallow work. But a tool that you have to keep fiddling with is just another distraction. Choose one simple setup and keep it for a month before changing it.
When “focus” isn’t the answer
Some days, you can’t concentrate because you’re tired, anxious, or overloaded. Telling yourself to try harder rarely helps. Check the basics first: sleep, food, movement, a real break. If you’re consistently overloaded, the fix may be fewer commitments, not better focus. Saying no to a project is also a productivity technique.
And accept some interruptions. A client emergency or a family matter outranks your work block. The aim is not zero interruptions. It’s making sure most of them are chosen by you.
The takeaway
Doing one thing at a time is not old-fashioned. It is how you finish the work that pays. Pick your one task, protect a block of time for it, batch the small stuff, and put the phone out of reach.
Try it for a week. Each day, choose one task, work on it for one uninterrupted block, and see how much you’ve finished by Friday. Most people are surprised.
Sources
- American Psychological Association, “Multitasking: Switching costs” (apa.org/topics/research/multitasking), summarizing Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans (2001), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
- Gloria Mark (UC Irvine), workplace interruption research, as reported in Fast Company, “Worker, Interrupted: The Cost of Task Switching” (fastcompany.com)