Introduction.
Most leaders do not decide to multitask. It develops slowly, shaped by trust, responsibility, and the unspoken expectation that you will be available, informed, and steady no matter what is happening around you. As roles expand, emails stay open because someone might need an answer. Meetings overlap because decisions need to keep moving. Messages are answered quickly because it feels respectful, professional, and efficient.
For a long time, this way of working appears to make sense.
You are responsive, visible, and trusted to keep momentum going. You become the person others rely on because you remain steady when pressure rises. In many organisations, that reliability is rewarded with more responsibility rather than less.
Then the role changes.
Not abruptly, but quietly. Decisions begin to carry more consequence. Fewer things are straightforward. The quality of judgement matters more than speed, yet the pace of the day remains exactly the same. The habits that once signalled competence now begin to compete with the work the role actually requires.
This is usually when leaders begin to feel something they struggle to put into words.
The days are full, but they do not feel complete. You move constantly, yet the work that requires thought keeps being squeezed into the margins. Decisions take more effort than they used to. Tasks reappear in different forms. You are busy, but not settled.
This is rarely a capability issue. It is almost always an attention issue, and attention is one of the few things leaders are personally responsible for managing.
When the Role Shifts but the Working Pattern Doesn’t.
As leaders become more senior, the nature of their work changes in ways that are not always immediately visible from the outside. Fewer tasks are transactional. More decisions require synthesis, emotional intelligence, and the ability to weigh second- and third-order consequences. The work becomes less about activity and more about judgment, often carried quietly rather than performed publicly.
What frequently does not change is how the day itself is structured.
Meetings still stack back-to-back. Messages continue to arrive throughout the day. The expectation to be responsive remains strong, even though the role now demands deeper thinking and clearer discernment. Many leaders find themselves caught between two identities: the dependable person who responds quickly and the senior decision-maker whose value lies in judgement. The result is not inefficiency, but fragmentation.
This experience is not anecdotal. In the UK, 73 percent of professionals report that virtual meetings reduce their productivity, with many describing frequent interruptions that fracture the working day and consume hours that could otherwise be used for focused work. When interruptions are this normalised, protecting thinking time begins to feel like a personal indulgence rather than a leadership requirement.
Over time, meetings and messages start to fill the gaps where thinking should sit. Decisions that could have been formed quietly and clearly instead get chased in conversation, adding to the sense of busyness while leaving the underlying work unresolved.
Why Multitasking Stops Saving Time.
Multitasking rarely fails in an obvious or dramatic way. Instead, it erodes time quietly, almost invisibly, through small inefficiencies that accumulate over days and weeks.
A document reviewed while monitoring emails often needs revisiting because key points were skimmed rather than absorbed. A decision made between meetings returns with follow-up questions because the implications were not fully considered. A conversation half-held generates further clarification later because attention was divided at the moment it mattered. None of this looks problematic in isolation, but together it creates a steady pattern of rework that is easy to underestimate.
Leaders often describe feeling as though they are constantly “catching up”, even when they are organised, diligent, and fully engaged. That pressure is not the result of laziness or poor planning. It is the predictable outcome of switching attention too often, which prevents work from reaching true completion the first time.
From a time-management perspective, multitasking does not compress work into smaller spaces. It stretches it across the day, increasing the number of times tasks have to be picked up, put down, and re-entered before they are finished.
This is reinforced by UK-based management guidance, which consistently shows that multitasking, more accurately described as rapid task-switching, can reduce productivity by up to 40 percent while also increasing the likelihood of errors. What looks like efficiency on the surface frequently creates more work later, not less.
The Hidden Cost to Decision-Making.
Decision-making is usually where the strain first shows up internally.
When attention is divided, decisions are made faster than they should be, not because leaders are careless, but because they are managing too many demands at once. The decision goes out, then returns with questions, edge cases, or implications that were not fully considered the first time.
Each return costs time and energy, but it also chips away at something less tangible. Over time, leaders begin to lose confidence that their decisions will hold, which makes decision-making itself feel heavier and more effortful than it needs to be. Straightforward calls start to require more reassurance, more checking, and more discussion.
This is not a failure of competence. It is what happens when fragmented attention is applied to work that now depends on sound judgement.
Peter Drucker captured this simply when he observed that “the first and best responsibility of a leader is to manage oneself.” In practice, that self-management shows up in the moments where attention is protected long enough for judgement to settle, rather than being rushed into motion and revisited later.
Meetings, Fragmentation, and the Illusion of Progress.
Meetings are often where multitasking becomes most visible, and where its cost is most easily disguised. Leaders arrive ready to contribute, but attention is split between the discussion in front of them, incoming messages, and the awareness that the next meeting is already queued up.
Many leaders will recognise the familiar pattern. A meeting is scheduled because a decision feels “nearly there” but not quite settled. People talk it through, perspectives are shared, and there is a sense of movement. The meeting ends with actions, follow-ups, or a request for one more piece of information. The decision hasn’t stalled, but it hasn’t landed either.
What is easy to miss is that meetings are rarely the root problem. They tend to expand when there has been little uninterrupted space for thinking beforehand. When judgement has not had time to form quietly, it gets worked out publicly, through discussion rather than clarity.
UK research suggests that over one third of business meetings are considered unproductive, with the estimated cost to organisations running into billions each year in lost time and opportunity. For leaders, this often shows up as days filled with conversation, yet a lingering sense that the most important decisions are still unresolved.
The illusion of progress is convincing. There is alignment, discussion, and apparent momentum. But much of that activity exists because decisions were not fully shaped before the meeting began. Over time, this pattern creates more coordination, more follow-up, and more meetings, while leaving leaders with less time to think than they had before.
The Fatigue That Builds Without Warning.
Multitasking creates a particular kind of fatigue that many leaders do not recognise at first, because it does not arrive as obvious burnout. It shows up as a persistent sense that days are never quite finished and thoughts are never fully settled.
Leaders can remain active from the first meeting to the last calendar block and still feel depleted, finding it harder to concentrate deeply on work that requires sustained attention. This is not dramatic exhaustion. It is the quieter fatigue that builds when attention never has time to recover before being pulled elsewhere.
That “never quite finished” feeling comes from days shaped by constant transitions rather than completion. You move from one item to the next while carrying unresolved questions and half-formed decisions forward. Over time, this ongoing cognitive load begins to feel like normal leadership pressure.
What makes this fatigue particularly risky is not how it feels, but how it subtly changes behaviour. Leaders become more reactive, less patient with complexity, and more inclined to default to familiar patterns rather than deliberate judgement. Good thinking is still possible, but it takes more effort than it should.
UK data reflects this experience. Over half of workers aged 35–54, the age group most likely to hold senior roles, report moderate to high levels of work-related stress, with chronic fatigue cited as a key contributor to burnout. This fatigue rarely presents as collapse. More often, it shows up as reduced concentration, lower decision confidence, and a sense that clarity requires disproportionate effort.
At this stage, many leaders assume they need to push harder. In reality, the issue is rarely stamina. It is sustained fragmentation of attention, which quietly reshapes how decisions are made long before anyone notices.
What Changes When Leaders Begin to Manage Themselves Differently.
The shift away from constant multitasking rarely begins with a grand decision. More often, it starts with a quiet recognition that the current way of working is no longer sufficient for the level of judgement the role now demands.
Leaders begin to notice small but meaningful differences when they manage their attention more deliberately. Work that once lingered now reaches completion without being reopened. Decisions hold, rather than returning with layers of clarification. Conversations become shorter, not because they are rushed, but because thinking has already happened before the discussion begins.
This is the point at which self-management becomes visible as leadership, not in theory, but in daily practice.
What changes most noticeably is not the volume of work, but the texture of the day. Time feels less jagged. Fewer tasks bleed into one another. There is a clearer sense of where effort is being spent and where judgement is being applied.
This is the point at which self-management becomes visible as leadership. By choosing when and where to give full attention, leaders reduce the need for constant correction and explanation. They are not withdrawing from the work; they are meeting it at the level it now requires.
Over time, this has a stabilising effect beyond the individual. Teams experience greater clarity because decisions are more settled. Expectations are clearer because leaders are less reactive. The pace of work remains demanding, but it becomes more deliberate and less corrective.
Importantly, this shift does not require perfect discipline or rigid control of every hour. It requires discernment. Leaders learn which moments genuinely require availability and which require depth, and that distinction is what allows time to be used with confidence rather than constant urgency.
When Time Management Becomes a Leadership Responsibility.
Multitasking helped many leaders reach the roles they hold today. It signalled reliability, responsiveness, and an ability to cope under pressure. In earlier stages of a career, those traits are often rewarded. They keep work moving and reassure others that things are under control.
But the skills that help you advance are not always the ones that sustain you once the work becomes more complex and more consequential.
At senior levels, leadership is less about speed and more about judgement. Less about visibility and more about discernment. Time management, in this context, is no longer a question of efficiency, but of responsibility. How you use your attention shapes the quality of decisions, the steadiness of your presence, and the experience of those who rely on you, often more than any formal strategy ever will.
The cost of constant multitasking is rarely immediate. It accumulates quietly, showing up in decisions that need revisiting, in days that feel full but unresolved, and in the subtle fatigue that makes good thinking feel harder than it should. None of this reflects a lack of capability. It reflects the limits of fragmented attention when the work itself has changed.
Leaders who step away from multitasking are not disengaging or pulling away from responsibility. They are recognising that managing themselves has become part of the role. They protect the moments that require judgement, not to control time, but to meet the work at the level it now requires.
The difference is subtle, but it compounds. Decisions hold. Work finishes properly. Fewer conversations are needed to correct or clarify. Time begins to feel less reactive and more intentional. Teams experience greater clarity, not because more is said, but because less needs to be undone.
This is what effective time management looks like at leadership level. Not doing more at once, but doing what matters with full attention. Over time, that choice becomes visible in the quality of leadership itself, and in the trust others place in it.
Thank you for reading
Regards, Paula
If this has been sitting with you while you listen, that’s usually a signal, not a coincidence.
Get in touch at www.donnancoachingservices.com
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