How to improve multitasking skills?

I used to think great founders could run three meetings at once, answer investors on the way to a sales call, and still rewrite the product deck in the lift. I tried that for a year. My team learned to wait for me because I was always rushing in with last minute changes. I learned the cost of being everywhere. It looked impressive. It was not leadership. It was noise. If you are trying to improve your ability to handle multiple demands, do not try to move faster. Design a system that makes context switching less expensive and makes attention predictable for the people who rely on you.

Start with a simple truth. You cannot do two cognitively heavy tasks at the same time. You can, however, sequence light with heavy, and you can compress admin into tight windows, and you can make your handoffs so clear that momentum continues when you leave the room. That is what most people mean when they say multitasking. They mean the art of not dropping the ball while working across streams. You can get better at that. It starts with attention stacks rather than a to do list.

An attention stack is a sequence of tasks grouped by depth and by required energy. Deep tasks require quiet and stretch time. Shallow tasks require speed and limited creativity. You improve your multitasking when you stack tasks with the same cognitive demand together. Investors ask for a revised narrative with numbers. That is deep. The engineering lead needs your decision on a naming conflict. That is shallow if the options are defined. Batch deep with deep. Batch shallow with shallow. The mistake is to pepper your deep hour with five micro approvals, a Slack reply, and a quick calendar fix. Each interruption charges a tax on reentry. Your productivity does not recover. Your team sees your scattered replies and learns to copy you. The organization becomes reactive because the founder is.

Once you build stacks, protect the edges. The first ten minutes of any deep block is ramp time. The last five minutes is closure. If you cannot give yourself those edges, the session will leak. I used to book a ninety minute writing block, then allow someone to call me at minute eighty five. I would tell myself I could switch quickly. I never could. The draft sat half formed and the next meeting absorbed my remaining focus. The fix was dull and powerful. I started scheduling immutable edges. The first five minutes are to revisit the frame and the last five minutes are to note decisions, open questions, and the very next action. The block ends only when I capture what future me needs to continue without reconstruction. It feels slow. It saves hours.

You also improve multitasking by making handoffs clean. If a handoff requires your presence to be understood, it is not a handoff. It is a delay. Your team needs decisions that include context, criteria, and ownership. I learned to send decisions in a three line format. Context in one sentence. Decision and its boundary in one sentence. Owner and due date in one sentence. Here is the effect. People stop pinging you for the missing piece. Work moves without you. You reduce the number of times you need to reenter the same problem. That is the hidden win of better multitasking. You are not actually doing more at once. You are reducing the number of return trips.

Meetings are where attention goes to die when you are sloppy. If you want to become better at juggling, cut the number of decision points you host. When a meeting can be a document, make it one with a clear comment deadline. When a meeting must happen, anchor it around a single decision. I now ask the owner to state the decision in the invite line. If there is no decision, there is no meeting. That rule freed ten hours a week across a twelve person team. With those hours, we repaired onboarding, rebuilt our core narrative, and closed a customer who had been “warming up” for six months. Real multitasking is not ten open tabs. It is a calendar that does not fight your priorities.

Another lever is the micro ritual between modes. You are in founder sales mode, then you switch to product mode, then you enter one on one coaching mode. These are not the same person. If you slide across them with no reset, the wrong voice will leak. I kept giving coaching feedback like a sales push. It landed badly. I added a ninety second reset ritual. Stand, water, one sentence written by hand about the next mode. The team noticed before I did. They told me I felt present. Presence is not mystical. It is what it feels like when you refuse to drag the previous task into the next one.

Founders try to fix multitasking by adding tools. The tool does not fix the absence of a decision rule. You will use the tool to crystallize the rule or to hide from it. Here is a rule that changed my week. Mornings belong to inputs. Midday belongs to outputs. Late afternoons belong to people. Inputs are reading, market scans, and writing that sets direction. Outputs are artifacts, approvals, and numbers. People time is feedback, interviews, and coaching. Once I grouped the day like this, I stopped pretending I could switch from board narrative writing to a hiring screen in three minutes, then back to the narrative with the same quality. I respected the friction cost and designed around it.

There is also the question you have been avoiding. What are you holding that another owner could handle at seventy percent of your standard within two weeks if you let them? You are not improving your multitasking. You are hoarding. I hoarded our investor updates because I thought only I could capture our story with enough nuance. The result was predictable. Updates were late. My team did not learn how to narrate our progress. When I finally handed it to a product marketer, she sent me a draft that felt different. I wanted to pull it back. Instead we agreed on a checklist of must include data points and a rhythm for founder notes. Two cycles later, I was a reviewer, not a bottleneck. That is the real progress marker. Your improvement shows up in how little you are needed for the same recurring deliverables.

Being reachable is not the same as being reliable. Reliability is the ability to receive a task, give it a time, and meet that time without drama. You will never feel safe delegating if your own delivery is a moving target. Choose a promise you can keep. Do not promise real time. Promise response bands. I tell the team I respond to urgent messages within an hour during working blocks, to non urgent threads by end of day, and to deep review requests within forty eight hours. If I break the band, I explain why. The point is not perfection. The point is a shared expectation that does not change with your mood or travel.

There is a quiet part of this conversation that founders avoid. You cannot improve multitasking if your sleep is a mess. You are trying to run two thought streams with half a brain. The work culture will applaud you for hero hours until you break. I used to believe I was the exception. I was not. There is nothing sophisticated about this fix. If you want a brain that can reenter a problem with speed and clarity, you need a consistent sleep window and a real shutdown sequence. The shutdown is a promise to your future self that nothing on your mind will be lost. I keep a nightly capture list. It holds half formed ideas, open loops, and names I need to contact. The list lives in one place. When my mind knows the loop is saved, it lets go. The next day, reentry is clean.

Improving multitasking also means being honest about which fires are real and which fires are performative. Some people seek you out because your attention signals importance. They want your presence more than your decision. If you are not careful, your day becomes a theater of urgency where nothing truly moves. I learned to test urgency with two questions. What breaks if we decide tomorrow. What breaks if the team decides without me. If the answer is nothing, the urgency is theatre. I decline politely and protect the stack. That is not arrogance. It is stewardship of the work only you can do.

When you travel, your system is stress tested. Airports will swallow focus. I used to try to keep regular depth on travel days. I always failed. The fix was acceptance and design. Travel day is now shallow task day with a single short deep module that I defend. I line up five approvals, three thank you notes, one vendor nudge, and a short deep block on the highest leverage narrative. I do not allow ad hoc add ons. The result is strangely calming. I finish the day feeling complete rather than drained by a day of almost work.

There is a myth that the best founders thrive in chaos. Some do. Most succeed because they built a rhythm that keeps them available for the hard calls while insulating their brain from constant shock. If you want to know whether your multitasking is improving, do not look at your inbox count. Look at the number of times your team delivers without you. Look at the quality of your own deep artifacts. Look at your reentry time after an interruption. Those measurements tell the truth.

The phrase how to improve multitasking skills hides a deeper invitation. You are being asked to choose what kind of leader you want to be when the day is noisy. Do you want to be the person who jumps into every thread and leaves a trail of half finished thought, or the person who moves a few important pieces forward and leaves clarity behind. The second path is quieter. It is also how teams scale.

If you want one place to start this week, start with edges. Protect the first five minutes of every deep block. Close with written next steps. Write your decisions in three lines. Batch shallow with shallow and deep with deep. Add a ninety second reset between modes. Promise response bands you can keep. Watch what happens to your energy and your team’s speed. Execution will feel less cinematic. It will feel steady. You will still carry many streams. You will simply stop pretending you can swim in all of them at the same time.

At some point a colleague will tell you that you feel different. They will say you seem more present. They will say they know when they will hear from you. They will say they can move without waiting for you. That is when you know your system is working. Multitasking no longer looks like juggling knives on a stage. It looks like a team moving through clean handoffs while you hold the line on what matters. That is not a productivity trick. That is leadership.