Quit multitasking to finish faster and better than before

A small marketing team was missing deadlines, convinced that constant Slack responsiveness was “part of the job.” Their manager ran a simple experiment. For one week, the team declared two daily single-task sprints of 40 minutes with all notifications off, a shared status set to “heads-down,” and a parking lot document for stray thoughts. They chose concrete outcomes for each sprint, like “Write the first draft of the case study intro,” not “Work on case study.”

By midweek, an intern admitted she had finished more in one morning than most entire days. Another teammate noticed he felt less mentally fried at 3 p.m. The office sounded different, too—quieter, but energized. They still had chatter and collaboration, just more on purpose. A micro-anecdote: one person caught herself reaching for her phone, smiled, and wrote “Text Sam after sprint” in the parking lot, then returned to the sentence she was writing.

At week’s end, they compared numbers and quality ratings. Draft volume rose 28%, revisions dropped because the writing was cleaner, and response time to messages didn’t suffer when they answered in batches. The team decided to keep the practice, not as a rigid rule, but as a default.

The mechanics are simple. Attention is a spotlight, not a floodlight. Switching tasks imposes a switching cost and leaves residue, which slows the next task. Short time-boxed sprints exploit ultradian rhythms, while outcome clarity and parking lots reduce cognitive load. It’s not about being stricter, it’s about aligning work with how brains actually function.

Choose one clear next outcome, set a 25–40 minute timer, silence the noise, and work only on that. When a thought pops up, jot it in a parking lot instead of switching. When the timer ends, take a short break, then review how much you finished and how clean it feels compared to your usual multitasking. Use that data to adjust your sprint length and guardrails. Try one sprint this afternoon and see what changes.