For as long as I’ve been in the workplace the productivity advice has been consistent - don’t multitask. Yeah it’s fine to process your emails while you’re sat on hold or whatever, but in general, it’s better to focus on one thing at a time and then move on. Context switching has an overhead that makes it inefficient and tiring to bounce back and forth more than necessary.
But I’m starting to wonder whether AI tools like Claude Cowork has changed things. The thing about working with Cowork is that each task tends to move in short bursts. You kick something off, wait anywhere from 30 seconds to ten minutes for it to process, review the output, give it the next instruction, and then you’re waiting again. It’s doing a huge amount of work, sometimes hours of work in a few minutes, but its not instant (yet).
I’ve found myself running multiple tasks concurrently. While one thing is running, I’ll start another, then a third, and come back to the first when it’s ready. Then I cycle between them. You can genuinely get more done in a session this way, and besides, it would be odd to start a task and just stare at the screen blankly for five minutes while it does its thing.
But the old advice about context switching still applies. Jumping between unrelated tasks is still taxing. I definitely feel more frazzled running lots of things at once, especially when the tasks are in completely different domains (eg reviewing finances while writing a presentation).
I know a coder friend who once described this as a problem to me, but for someone who is fully into office life and lives in Word docs and spreadsheets, its a new challenge.
I’m curious whether others are experiencing this. Have you found ways to manage the juggling act effectively?
I am by no means proficient yet with Cowork, can we equate this to becoming a manager of multi person staff? It feels a little bit like part of my job is heading toward managing agents instead of doing the work myself.
IMO that is an excellent way to think of this. Humans can’t perform two or more tasks concurrently, we switch between tasks. Much like we manage people who report directly to us.
I am the poster child for the toll multitasking takes on the psyche. I rely on the fact that Claude will wait patiently for me to return without complaint while I focus on something else.
I haven’t fired up Claude and its minions for anything particularly time-sensitive, though. If Claude and I were working on three different things against a deadline I might not be so complacent …
I feel the need to say that it always depends on what the tasks are, what your experience and role is and what the nature of the work is. I can’t write or work on an image or put up a shelf and do anything else, but I can certainly multitask and do it very often: I do it every time I make a family meal and organise the grandchildren to get their homework done before it will be ready and help them solve the myriad obstacles to getting started and I can communicate with my wife and their parents to co-ordinate their arrival for the meal.
Whether it’s a good idea to use a chatbot or agent in this way, I don’t know, but whenver productivity advice gets too simple, it’s wrong.
