Here’s what you do.
Stand up at your desk. Pat your head and rub your tummy (counterclockwise, please.) Now sing “All You Need is Love” while you jump up and down. If you can do all this, all at once, congratulations. You’re multitasking. You’re also providing evidence that you’re way overworked and require an immediate, company-paid visit to a sun-kissed island and intense pina colada therapy.
Yes, multitasking is not good for your mental health or for the economic health of your company. After all, if your brain explodes, management will have to hire the three people actually required to do your job.
While too much multitasking is scientifically linked to burnout (or worse, burn-up), most treatments for the condition are designed to teach you how to do one thing at a time, or, as we say in the career-advice biz, monotasking. But I’m going to teach you something much better than monotasking — “zerotasking,” looking like you’re really busy, when you’re actually doing nothing at all.
Is this necessary? Consider “A Multitasker’s Guide to Retaining Focus,” an article by Anna Borgas in The New York Times.
Borgas makes the case that for workers today multitasking has become the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, our brains are not wired for it. Blame it on our prehistoric forebearers. When confronting a saber-tooth tiger, Paleolithic Paul and Neolithic Nancy didn’t need to respond to a threat until instituting an AI search and consulting with the head of marketing and checking the score of the Penguins-Panthers game and answering six urgent emails from accounting. They simply had to run like hell.
That’s focus.
Ready to eliminate multitasking from your work life? Believe you can achieve zerotasking in 2026? Empty your head of trivial questions, like “Will AI take my job?” and “What’s the meaning of the weird look my manager just gave me?” and let’s get focused.
No. 1: Watch Your Head.
Professor of informatics Gloria Mark recommends you “start by observing yourself throughout the day, noticing when and how you task-switch without realizing it.” The idea here is to pick one task and stick to it as long as possible. The easiest time to do this, research tells us, “peaks around midmorning and midafternoon” — ideal times for you since mid-morning is time when your brain is 100 percent occupied deciding where to go lunch and midafternoon is nap-time, when you’re 100 percent focused on stacking those apres-lunch Z’s.
Once you have isolated one task for your full focus, simply forget about everything else you are supposed to do. If you’re afraid this will cause problems with your manager, don’t worry. They’ve eliminated you from their multitasking agenda long, long ago.
No. 2: This Is Your Brain on Work.
Filling your brain to the brim with work stuff leaves no space for the “unpredictable nature of the world.”
For example, the credit you might have received for completing major projects could vanish completely when your manager randomly stops you to ask, “Who’s your favorite Mormon housewife?” and you look like a complete doofus because your brain is too full of reports, projections and initiatives to reply.
By zerotasking all your projects and leaving your brain completely empty, you’ll be able to respond to your manager’s important question with the important answer it deserves. (It’s Taylor Frankie Paul, of course.)
No. 3: Taking a Break from Taking a Break.
Most multitasking is actually task-switching, like how you switch between lavishing your manager with praise and frantically sending out job applications. If you’re still switching between tasks, Mark recommends training your brain to do one task at a time. For example, if you are reading an article, force yourself to get to the last sentence before checking your notifications.
This is no problem when it comes to my articles. Most readers are able to stop after the first sentence.
No. 4: Do What You Do Best: Nothing.
Once you have managed to whittle down the number of tasks you do at the same time, all it takes to achieve zerotasking is to take the one task you’ve decided to focus on and forget about it, as well.
Being a loyal and motivated team member, this may go against the grain, but remember: Your company demands excellence, and doing nothing is what you do best. It’s your superpower and there’s never been a better time to use it.
Look around you! No one is thinking about anything. Obviously.
It’s 2026 and the future belongs to the empty-headed.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com
Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate Inc.