Why is it important to be able to multitask?

I used to treat my busyness like proof that I deserved to lead. My days were a blur of tabs and tones. Slack pinged with new fires. A term sheet call overlapped with a supplier visit. Somewhere between those interruptions a teammate needed feedback on a hiring brief. For a long time I believed that saying yes to everything was what founders were supposed to do. On a rare quiet Friday I noticed something I could not ignore. Revenue was rising, yet the team felt worn out and nothing seemed fully owned by anyone, including me. That afternoon taught me a lesson that shaped how I build. Multitasking can keep a young company alive, but only when it is used as a tool with limits. Treated as a personality trait, it slowly weakens judgment and trust.

Early stage companies are short on people and long on open loops. You pitch before lunch, squash a production bug after lunch, and rewrite a pricing paragraph before dinner. The calendar does not care about perfect sequencing. Customers do not wait for a slot on your schedule. Investors will not move a meeting because you planned deep work for that hour. In that reality, the question is not whether you multitask. The question is whether you can switch contexts without losing clarity, keep promises across functions, and protect the few systems that keep the lights on.

Multitasking matters first because it reduces friction. When a founder can move from a sales objection to a budget tweak to a product decision in the same afternoon, the company spends less time idling. The benefit compounds. Deals close sooner. Bugs are resolved before they grow into incidents. Candidates feel the pull of momentum and decide to join. Speed does not only come from working faster. It comes from changing gears without drama. Every clean switch buys the team a little more runway.

It also strengthens pattern recognition. When you spend your morning in finance and your afternoon in support, you begin to see the thread that connects customer churn to an unnoticed feature cost. You hear a refrain that appears in prospect calls and again in help desk tickets. You notice how a single change in onboarding shifts both revenue timing and refund risk. A narrow view can miss these links. Multitasking, done with attention, lets you see the business as a living system rather than a set of isolated tasks.

There is a human dimension too. Early teams take cues from the founder’s emotional pace. If you move across contexts and remain calm, specific, and steady, you set a temperature that others can rely on. People do not need a superhero. They need someone who keeps a promise at six in the evening even when the three o’clock fire ran long. The ability to multitask with grace signals that promises are real, not aspirational.

There is, however, a way to get it wrong. I have done it. I once tried to run product feedback, hiring, and fundraising in the same week with no protection for deep work. Every meeting became a half answer. We shipped a feature that looked polished in a demo and collapsed under real usage. I blamed the sprint. The real cause was my fragmented attention. I treated multitasking as a badge rather than a responsibility, and the company paid the price through rework and frustration.

The change began when I stopped defining multitasking as doing many things at once. I started defining it as closing loops in sequence with clean handoffs. I still moved across functions inside a single day, but I did it through focused blocks with one outcome each. A block could end in a decision, a draft, a call, or a handoff note that let someone else continue without me. I adopted one rule that rescued my mental bandwidth. Do not carry more than two open loops into the evening. Two is manageable. Three becomes static. Static becomes mistakes.

Context also matters. Building across Southeast Asia and the Gulf taught me that multitasking is cognitive and relational. In Kuala Lumpur, partners value face time and warmth. In Singapore, clients respect punctual decisions and crisp follow up. In Riyadh, momentum and relationship rhythm influence whether doors open. Switching among these modes while maintaining tone and respect is a form of multitasking that cannot be captured by a task app. It is about cultural fluency and emotional presence.

Another helpful adjustment was to label my switches aloud. I began to say, I am closing the hiring tab for two hours to finish the pricing memo. If you need me, use the red channel. That short statement offered clarity and permission. It told the team what I was not doing and when I would be back. It made switching visible and predictable. The work stopped feeling like a guessing game.

There is a common claim that deep work and multitasking cannot coexist. In a perfect world, that might be true. In a startup, you braid them. The braid is simple. Protect one non negotiable deep block each day where only one thing exists. Use the rest of the day to move across functions with clean outcomes and explicit handoffs. If you are pulled out of your deep block, perform a two minute reset. Write one sentence that describes where you stopped and one sentence that states the very next action. Then switch. You are leaving a breadcrumb trail for your future self and you are lowering the cost of resuming.

Another insight came when I separated attention from presence. I used to attend every vendor call to show that I cared. It actually signaled a lack of trust and diluted my usefulness. I started asking a different question. Where does my presence increase the chance of a correct decision today. If the answer was nowhere, I wrote a short decision memo and stepped out. That is still multitasking. It shifts the focus from being in every room to ensuring that the right outcomes happen in the right rooms.

Some people worry that this is a disguised argument for overwork. It is not. It is an argument for boundaries that help you last. The day you cannot switch cleanly is the day your judgment slips. Sleep becomes strategy. Food becomes strategy. Quiet becomes strategy. Your brain is a limited machine. Treat it like a limited machine and it will carry you through a fundraise without turning every decision into a coin flip. Ignore its limits and the company will feel the cost long before the metrics reveal it.

To teach a team to do this with you, agree on a shared language for closed loops. In one company it might be a merged pull request. In another it might be a signed invoice. In a services firm it might be an email that confirms next steps with a date. Whatever the form, make the handoff note easy to read. Action, owner, deadline, link. No poetry. No mystery. When switches are crisp, multitasking stops being personal and starts being operational.

As the company matures, parts of this should fade. Senior hires take clear lanes. Processes stabilize. The company can afford single lane work in more areas. Do not cling to early chaos because it made you feel vital. Replace multi lane heroics with multi order clarity. Weekly sequencing should replace daily firefighting. Decline new loops until previous ones are closed. Keep the speed, remove the cortisol. That is what real scaling feels like from the inside.

This brings us back to the core question. Why is it important to be able to multitask. Because the early stage does not wait for tidy calendars and single purpose days. Because customers and partners move on if you cannot shift gears. Because your team needs a leader who can cross product, people, and pipeline without dropping the thread that ties them together. Multitasking, used with intention and boundaries, turns chaos into cadence.

If today already feels blown apart, begin with something small and real. Pick one loop and close it. Write a two sentence handoff for the next loop. Tell your team which tab you are on. Then move. Multitasking is not magic. It is a rhythm that becomes steadier with practice. When it turns steady, the company stops feeling like a storm and begins to feel like a build.