Multitasking Is Bad for Everyone and Especially Costly for Neurodivergent Folks
How the multitasking culture of academia quietly drains everyone—and asks neurodivergent scholars to pay the highest price.
Some days, academic life can feel like a thousand tiny demands pulling your attention in every direction—emails, Zooms, Slack messages, and “quick questions.” For neurodivergent brains, that constant switching isn’t just tiring; it’s unsustainable. As I’ve been taking a continuing education course on neurodivergent coaching, I’ve started to see more clearly how deeply the academy’s systems rely on—and reward—this kind of constant multitasking.
Point and case, a conversation with a client who has AuDHD (autism and ADHD) keeps echoing in my mind. She pointed out that academia constructs entire careers based on the expectation of constant multitasking—an expectation that significantly impacts a nervous system already tasked with managing attention and sensory input. Academia expects us to teach a full load, answer student emails at all hours, keep up with publishing, sit on multiple committees, and say yes to every “quick” service request—treating that nonstop juggling of teaching, research, and service as the norm rather than an extreme.
Today, I aim to explore why multitasking is rough on many of us—and why, for many neurodivergent scholars, it can be downright brutal.
Death by a Thousand Interruptions
Let’s start with the day-in-the-life version, because I suspect it will sound familiar. You start the morning intending to write, with 9:00–11:00 blocked off for working on your article. This is how things actually unfold:
9:07am— A student email pops up in bold italics: “URGENT—Problem with assignment.” You tell yourself you’ll just skim it.
By 9:15am—You’re checking the LMS, responding to the student, and forwarding something to your TA.
9:27am —You swivel back to the manuscript, reread the last paragraph to remember where you were, and try to reconstruct your argument.
9:32am—A notification appears about a curriculum revision meeting later that day. You scan the agenda, open a browser tab to find the old syllabus, and make a mental note to “think about this more later.”
9:50am—You finally get back to the article… just in time for a 10:00am Zoom with your co-author.
11:00am —After the co-author meeting, you answer a couple of “quick” messages from colleagues about a committee issue, accept a journal review request (why?), and peek at the news (ugggghhhh, terrible idea).
11:15am — Suddenly it’s two hours later, and the writing block that looked so promising on your calendar has been sliced and diced. On top of this, the constant multitasking makes your brain feel like a pinball machine.
A Peak into Some Research
Dr. Gloria Mark, a researcher who has spent decades studying interruptions and attention in knowledge work, describes multitasking as a kind of rapid mental gear-shifting. Each time we switch from one task to another, our work becomes fragmented; we have to spend extra energy just to reconstruct the thread of what we were doing before we were pulled away.
Mark and her colleagues found that after an interruption, it takes people on average around 23 minutes to get back to the same depth of focus they had before they were interrupted. That’s not just the five-second glance at your phone; that’s the full cost of ramping your brain back up.
In her Chronicle article on academic multitasking, Mark highlights what many of us already feel in our bones: all this switching increases errors, elevates stress, and ultimately makes us less productive, not more. She talks about how we string fragments of work together into a fragile semblance of continuity and how much invisible effort it takes just to hold everything in our heads.
When Mark recommends time-blocking similar tasks together and even revising promotion policies to focus less on sheer quantity, she’s not just being idealistic—she’s translating a robust body of attention research into practical suggestions for the academy. Imagine that: promotion policies that don’t reward being constantly on.
Thinking with Neurodivergent Brains
And here’s where I want to add a layer that often gets left out of mainstream productivity conversations: all of this is not experienced equally by all brains. Cognitive psychologists talk about “executive functions”—the set of mental processes that help us plan, prioritize, hold information in mind, shift between tasks, and inhibit distractions. Some people’s executive systems can tolerate a lot of gear-shifting before things start to wobble. Other people’s cannot.
A 2012 study by Joshua Ewen and colleagues, for example, found that when children with ADHD were asked to manage multiple tasks at once, the interference between tasks was significantly greater than it was for their non-ADHD peers. In other words, multitasking was more disruptive for the ADHD group because their brains process and regulate attention differently.
We see similar patterns in research on autism and executive function. Studies using something called the “Virtual Errands Task” (a multitasking simulation where participants must juggle several errands under time pressure in a virtual environment) show that high-functioning autistic adolescents have more difficulty coordinating multiple tasks and time constraints than non-autistic peers, even when their general intelligence is comparable. Other work on autistic adults, like Michelle Kiep and Annelies Spek’s study of executive functioning, finds ongoing challenges with cognitive flexibility, task switching, and working memory compared to neurotypical control groups.
So when we say “multitasking is bad for everyone,” that’s true—but it’s incomplete. Multitasking is catastrophic for some people. If you’re ADHD, autistic, AuDHD, or possess a number of other beautifully diverse ways of moving through the world, the cost of every single gear shift tends to be higher. You might experience more fatigue, more internal noise, more anxiety, or more difficulty reassembling your thoughts after an interruption. You might need longer to regain focus, not because you’re somehow worse at your job, but because your very efficient brain is simply wired to work best under different conditions than the ones academia happens to be offering.
The Equity Cost of Fragmented Attention
This is where my client with AuDHD comes back in. She’s realized that she needs to build transition time between tasks and, whenever possible, group similar kinds of work together so she’s not constantly switching gears. Of course, it’s not always possible—some days she looks at her schedule and knows it’s going to take more energy because she’ll be moving from teaching to meetings to writing to child pick-up and back again. Her experience lines up with what the research shows: the problem isn’t a lack of capability—it’s the cumulative load of constant switching in an environment that assumes everyone can and should be “on” to everything, all the time.
It’s also important to name that this isn’t just an individual productivity issue; it’s an equity and accessibility issue. If we know from attention research that constant interruptions increase error rates and stress for knowledge workers in general, and we know from ADHD and autism research that multitasking is especially costly for certain neurotypes, then a work culture that normalizes fragmented attention is a work culture that structurally disadvantages some scholars more than others.
When we valorize the colleague who answers emails in five minutes, shows up to every meeting, churns out review reports at lightning speed, and still publishes prolifically, we’re quietly rewarding a brain-environment fit that many people simply don’t have—and then asking everyone else to keep up.
On top of all this, Gloria Mark’s research is quite clear that neurotypical folks aren’t doing their best work in this environment either. So what do we do with all of this, besides collectively sigh?
Some Ideas for Individuals
Of course we need structural change in our institutions so that everyone can thrive. In the meantime, here are some things that might help at the individual level, although I always contend that you have to figure out the strategies that work best for your life and your brain.
First, time-blocking is a useful way of reducing the number of times your brain has to slam on the brakes and reorient. Grouping similar tasks—batching your student emails into one or two windows per day, doing all of your teaching prep in a single block, and scheduling meetings together rather than sprinkling them across your “writing days”—can dramatically reduce fragmentation. Mark’s research suggests that fewer switches mean less stress and fewer errors, which is good for everyone, but especially for those whose executive systems are already doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Second, we can design our personal systems around how our brains actually work, not how we think they’re “supposed” to work. For some neurodivergent scholars, this might mean:
Using external scaffolding—timers, visual schedules, checklists, Kanban boards—to avoid holding too many moving parts in working memory at once.
Having explicit “offline” writing blocks where inboxes and messaging apps are closed and notifications are silenced or turned off at the device level, not just “minimized in the background.”
Communicating clear boundaries with students and colleagues about response times (“I respond to student email within 24–48 hours”) so that you’re not constantly monitoring your inbox out of guilt.
Choosing—where you have any control at all—to say no to roles that require constant context-switching in favor of roles that allow more sustained focus.
None of these strategies are magic, and all of them are constrained by your specific role, rank, institution, and life context. But they’re also experiments you’re allowed to run, especially if the current setup is leading you toward burnout.
Third, and this is the harder one, we can start nudging the structural pieces. Mark’s suggestion that we “revise promotion policies to de-emphasize quantity” might feel laughably far from your current reality, but I do think there is room for small, local acts of resistance.
When you have a say in how meetings are scheduled, you can advocate for meeting-light days or for clustering meetings instead of scattering them. When you’re chairing a committee, you can resist the “always on” culture by setting reasonable expectations about communication, timelines, and what counts as “urgent.” When you’re mentoring students, you can model writing practices that honor focused time instead of pretending that “true commitment” means being available to everyone at any moment.
Mostly, though, I want you to hear this: If multitasking feels especially exhausting to you, you’re not imagining it and you’re not failing. Your nervous system is sending you accurate data about a mismatch between your brain and the demands being placed on it.
As always, my invitation is to treat writing (and work) as an ongoing experiment rather than a test you’re either passing or failing. You can notice when fragmented work leaves you drained and scattered. You can pay attention to how your brain responds when you protect a 90-minute monotasking block, even once a week. You can experiment with boundaries that feel a little scary to set but that create actual breathing room in your days.
And you can gently set down any productivity advice—yes, including mine—that insults your nervous system.