When trying to do everything at once means getting less done

In 2026, it seems as though everyone is busy. Our calendars are full, our inboxes are  overflowing and we’re working across multiple projects, each carrying its own deadlines,  meetings and urgent requests. 

Yet despite all this activity, in many organisations a lot of important work keeps falling  behind. 

Leaders often interpret this as a capacity problem: there’s simply too much work and not  enough time to complete it. The only answers are to hire more people or ask the current  people to work even harder. 

Sometimes that diagnosis is correct, but sometimes it’s not – or at least not fully. 

That’s because the more common problem isn’t that an organisation has too much  work, it’s that it has too much work happening at once. And when this happens,  employees get overloaded, becoming less productive, less efficient and more likely to  make errors. 

If you want to know whether that’s happening in your organisation and what you can do  to fix it, read on. 

How overload creates even more overload 

Imagine a team responsible for six important projects and, rather than deciding which  projects should take priority, its leaders ask the team to progress all six at the same  time.

Employees then move constantly between them. They leave one task unfinished to  attend a meeting about another. Then a supposedly urgent request arrives, so they  abandon the work they’ve just resumed and move to another project still.  

This leads to a self-reinforcing and inefficient cycle, in which: 

• Too much work is started 
• Employees switch constantly between unfinished tasks 
• Productivity and accuracy decline 
• Work takes longer to complete 
• More projects become urgent, and  
• Urgent work creates still more switching and interruption. 

MIT Sloan researchers Nelson Repenning and Donald Kieffer compare the effect to  traffic on a busy highway. Adding more cars initially allows more people to reach their  destinations. But once the road approaches capacity, each additional car makes every  journey slower. Eventually, the road becomes so congested that almost nobody moves. 

The same principle applies to knowledge work. Giving every employee a full workload  may appear efficient but, when the system becomes overloaded, starting more work can  reduce the amount that ultimately gets finished. 

In other words, just as a full road isn’t necessarily a productive road, a completely  occupied workforce isn’t necessarily a productive one either. 

The hidden cost of switching between tasks 

Part of the problem is that switching between tasks isn’t instantaneous or cost-free.  Every time we move from one project, client or application to another, we need to work  out where we were, recall the relevant information we might have forgotten and refocus  our attention on the new task. 

Individually, each transition may take only a few moments. But repeated hundreds of  times across a working week, those moments add up. 

A Harvard Business Review study tracked 137 employees across 20 teams at three  Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks. It found that employees switched between  applications and websites around 1,200 times a day.

The researchers estimated that workers spent almost four hours each week simply  reorienting themselves after these switches: equivalent to around 9% of their total  working time. 

And switching between applications is only the most easily measured form of task  switching. Employees also move constantly between different projects, clients,  meetings, approvals and unexpected requests, often leaving one piece of work  unfinished to deal with another. 

The organisation pays a small productivity cost every time an employee changes  direction even though the cumulative cost can remain largely invisible. 

Instead, the consequences show up elsewhere: in longer completion times, missed  details, avoidable errors and employees who reach the end of a relentlessly busy day  wondering why they made so little meaningful progress. 

Why unfinished work follows us into the next task 

Even after we’ve moved to another task, part of our attention can remain fixed on the  work we left behind. 

Professor Sophie Leroy coined the term “attention residue” to describe this effect. Her  research discovered that people have difficulty fully shifting their attention away from an  unfinished task and, as a result, tend to perform less effectively on whatever they do  next.  

Consider an employee who stops writing an important report halfway through to attend  a meeting. During the meeting, they receive an urgent request from a client. They then  leave the meeting, respond to the client and return to the report, pausing along the way  to answer several emails and messages. 

Technically, that employee has worked on several things. But they may not have given  their complete attention to any of them. 

This is why carrying too many active projects creates more than an administrative  burden. Every unfinished task occupies some mental space. The more often people are  required to change direction, the more likely they are to carry thoughts, concerns and  unresolved decisions from one task into the next.

We may move from one piece of work to another without bringing all of our attention  with us. The result is slower thinking, reduced concentration and a greater likelihood of  overlooking important details. 

For some neurodivergent employees – particularly those who experience differences in  executive functioning, working memory or transitioning between tasks – the effects of an  overloaded and unpredictable workplace can often be compounded further. 

When everything becomes urgent 

As overloaded teams take longer to complete their work, more projects begin  approaching (or passing) their deadlines. Leaders respond by elevating whichever task  is under the greatest immediate pressure and pulling people away from their existing  work to deal with it. 

This may solve the immediate problem. But it also delays everything those employees  were doing before the latest request arrived. 

Soon, one of those abandoned tasks becomes urgent too. It is pushed to the front of the  queue, interrupting another piece of work and creating another future delay. Priorities  change repeatedly, employees receive competing instructions and the organisation spends increasing amounts of time deciding what should happen next rather than  completing it. 

This can create a workplace in which: 

• Employees are regularly pulled away from work already underway 
• Managers spend more time following up and requesting progress reports
• Meetings multiply as teams attempt to coordinate changing priorities
• Deadlines lose credibility because everyone expects them to change, and
• Work is rushed as projects finally reach crisis point, increasing errors and rework. 

Urgency can look like responsiveness. The employee who drops everything to rescue a  delayed project appears committed, while the manager who rapidly reallocates  resources appears decisive. 

But when urgent interventions become routine, it’s usually a sign that work is no longer  flowing properly. Each rescue pushes another task closer to crisis, ensuring that the  cycle continues.

When that happens, sustained overload can also become a workplace health and safety  issue. Safe Work Australia identifies high job demands (including having too much to do  in too little time) as a psychosocial hazard when they are severe, prolonged or frequent.  

To prevent this from happening, it recommends redesigning inefficient processes,  planning the workforce appropriately and allowing enough time for difficult tasks to be  completed safely. 

Hiring more people may not solve the problem 

When employees are overloaded and deadlines are slipping, hiring additional people  can seem like the obvious solution. And sometimes it is. If your organisation simply has  more work than your workforce can reasonably perform, increasing capacity may be  essential. 

But before you begin recruiting, make sure you identify what’s actually preventing work  from being completed. Broadly, the constraint will usually involve one or more of three  things: 

• Capacity: There aren’t enough people available to perform the work
• Capability: The organisation lacks particular knowledge, experience or skills, or
• Workflow: Work is being poorly prioritised, distributed or progressed. 

Recruitment can address the first two problems but it won’t usually fix the third. 

Adding employees to an overloaded system can create more handovers, meetings and  communication. New team members are likely to find themselves managing the same  competing priorities and interruptions as everyone else. Rather than increasing the  organisation’s output, the additional coordination can make an already congested  workflow more complicated. 

This doesn’t mean you should delay necessary recruitment or expect existing  employees to absorb unreasonable workloads. It means hiring decisions should form  part of a broader assessment of how work moves through the organisation. 

If work is stalled everywhere, priorities change constantly and employees are carrying  too many unfinished tasks, the underlying problem is likely to be systemic rather than  the result of any employee or team.

Stop starting and start finishing 

One of the most effective ways to relieve overload is to limit the amount of work being  progressed at any one time. 

This can feel counterintuitive. You might begin to worry that delaying the start of a  project means losing momentum or becoming less responsive. But MIT found that  employers who:  

• regulate the amount of work entering the system, and
• allow employees to complete an active task before redirecting them

reduced the time required to complete work by as much as 90%. 

Limiting work in progress also makes problems easier to see. When employees are  juggling dozens of active tasks, it can be difficult to distinguish genuine capacity  constraints from confusion and congestion.  

The scale of the problem is reflected in Atlassian’s 2024 State of Teams research.  

In a survey of 5,000 knowledge workers, 64% said their teams were constantly being  pulled in too many directions, while 70% believed they would make better progress with  fewer, more specific goals. 

To overcome this in your organisation, Repenning and Kieffer recommend: 

• Making active work visible across the team
• Setting realistic limits on the number of projects being progressed simultaneously
• Establishing clear priorities and acknowledging the work that will consequently need to wait
• Allowing employees to finish existing tasks before assigning new ones
• Protecting work already underway from unnecessary interruption, and
• Identifying recurring bottlenecks, such as approvals, specialist input or management decisions.

The difficult part is the need to make genuine choices about what the organisation will – and won’t – work on now.

Diagnose the problem before adding more work 

Modern work will always involve competing responsibilities, changing circumstances  and occasional interruptions that impact work/life balance. 

The goal isn’t to eliminate these things or ensure your employees only ever work on one  task at a time. It’s to prevent the amount of simultaneous work from exceeding the  team’s ability to keep it moving. 

So, when deadlines begin slipping and employees appear overwhelmed, resist the  temptation to respond by simply increasing pressure, changing priorities again or  immediately adding more work (and people) to the system. Instead, begin by asking: 

• Do we genuinely have enough people to perform the work?
• Do our employees have the right capabilities and experience?
• Where does work repeatedly slow down or stop?
• How often are employees being pulled away from work already underway?
• Are our priorities clear and consistent?
• Are we progressing too many projects simultaneously?

After all, recruitment can increase capacity, but it cannot by itself repair a system that  continually prevents people from completing their work.  

Instead, the answers to the questions above might point to a need for additional  capacity, new capabilities, a redesigned workflow or some combination of the three. 

Want more? 

Not sure whether your organisation needs more people, different capabilities or a better  way of managing work? 

Catalina Consultants can help you assess your workforce, priorities and processes,  then develop a practical HR strategy aligned with your organisation’s goals.