No, Multitasking Isn’t a Superpower… and 10 Other Things I Needed to Hear After the Last 14 Months

I should have known. Every time men tell women they’re inherently better at something, it’s always a con, isn’t it?

You are just better at cooking! Remember when I washed the strawberries with soap?

It was earlier today while I was writing this post, eating lunch, uploading a video for our course on financial literacy, texting an investor, and recording session three of our upcoming course “The Burn Out, Opt Out” with Nataly Kogan, when I heard Nataly say:

“….Let’s talk about some of the most common things that unnecessarily drain our energy. The first one is my favorite: Multitasking. There is this myth that’s been going around that women are amazing at multitasking. That is a bunch of BS, ok?”

My brain perked up when I heard multitasking, something I’m AWESOME at. Oh…

I swallowed my bite of turkey sandwich and closed the other windows on my laptop.

Go on, Nataly…I’m listening.

“That is a bunch of BS because first of all, there’s no such thing as multitasking. Your brain cannot do two things that require your focus and attention at the same time. It is not possible. Instead, things we call multitasking like checking your email as you are listening to me right now…”

GULP. *Puts phone down too*

“That is just switch tasking, going from one thing to another, one thing to another. Two things are problematic about that. The first is every time we switch tasks we lose about 25% of our effectiveness at it… we actually make it harder for us to get stuff done. The second thing is, it’s exhausting. It drains your energy. Because your brain has to keep focusing on all these different things. It is one of the most common things that drains your energy.”

Ok, my sheer exhaustion of the past 14 months — five years, 45 years — suddenly makes a lot more sense.

How the pace of news under the Trump Administration made me feel like I couldn’t get anything done. How constant interruptions from my kids during quarantine made me feel more exhausted than pulling an all-nighter. Why taking Twitter and Facebook off my phone made me feel so much less irritable overnight. How the surge of the pandemic suddenly made me need 30 minute power naps.

Is multitasking really a net loss??? Is it possible that so many of the things I’ve prided myself on, even reasons I’ve gotten funding as an entrepreneur, things that people say they admire about me… is it possible those things are actually holding me back?

And if so, WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME THIS BEFORE!?!?!?!

I’ll tell you why: It’s the same reason women mistakenly believe that we hold some magical genetic key to doing it better than anyone else. The longer we believe this, the more completely annoying, thankless tasks we take on. Our entire gender has been Tom Sawyered into painting a fence by all these congrats on multitasking that were only draining and burning us out more.

AYFKM!?!?!?!?

Nataly Kogan speaks from burn out experience, as do I, as does basically every woman I know in 2021. A refugee from the former Soviet Union, she came to America hungry to achieve! achieve! achieve! On paper, she was slaying the American Dream. But she wasn’t happy. And she severely burned out.

It was a wake up call that changed her life, changed her career, and set her on a path to discover the research, brain science, and sometimes just plain common sense around happiness, burnout, and everything in between.

She’s distilled decades of learning into a tight four-week course for Chairman Mom, aimed especially at anyone who used to think multitasking was something to brag about.

I consider myself pretty good at work/life balance, pretty efficient, and awesome at drawing boundaries. I actually didn’t know how badly I needed this course.

Here are other learnings from the course I absolutely needed to hear and wish someone had told me a few decades ago:

1. Self care isn’t something you earn and it’s not something for lazy people. Self care is about either A) conserving or B) refueling your emotional energy. We wouldn’t consider gasoline or an electrical charging station a nice-to-have for a road trip.
2. Emotional energy can be conserved and refueled, but it’s still somewhat finite and zero-sum. Before we say yes, ask yourself: Can I energetically afford this?
3. The brain science behind why setting boundaries and saying no is SO HARD. (Hint: It has to do with human evolution, the need to be part of a group to survive, and our fear we’ll be cast out if we say no.)
4. You brain doesn’t actually care if you are happy. It doesn’t care if you are sad. Your brain is wired to care about one thing: Survival. And that’s where the annoying voice in your head comes from.
5. You can edit that voice. That BS your brain tells you is just the rough draft. It just takes practice. (Nataly will show you how.)
6. Ten minutes a day can dramatically change your life and help you avoid burnout for good.
7. Resting is not “doing nothing.” Resting done right is giving your brain a chance to reset and create new creative connections.
8. Acceptance of the way things are is EVERYTHING. Acceptance ≠ resignation. Acceptance is accepting the present. Acceptance without narrative, judgement, pity party, emotional rage, a whole BS story is the difference between living with challenges and living with STRUGGLE. Challenges will always be there; struggle is optional.
9. It takes a lot of emotional labor to pretend.
10. Milestones and achievements don’t make you happy in the long term, thanks to the adaptability of the human brain.
11. Women have more grunt work than men. We’ve been sold a bunch of BS like pride in multitasking. We just survived 14 months of sheer “you’re in this alone!” hell. We’ve been set back a generation in the workforce.

It’s about time we paused to learn how to do everything we need to do in a sustainable way, while cutting out everything else.

We can’t go back to the way things were before. We need to do things smarter, better, and yes — easier. Yes, it’s possible and I encourage you to check Nataly’s 4-week course on burnout.

Not quite sold? Then come to our 100% free Zoom Thursday where Nataly will similarly blow your mind with AYFKM?? knowledge bombs. Free gifts for all burned out, charbroiled husks who attend! (Nope, you don’t have to be a mom…we’re all burned out right?)