Multitasking Costs You 40% of Your Productivity — Here's Why

Ines prides herself on being good at multitasking. Email while on calls. Slack while writing reports. Spotify while doing both.

Then one afternoon, she realizes she's read the same paragraph four times. She's been on a call for twenty minutes and can't recall a single point. Her Slack has seventeen unread threads she doesn't remember opening.

She's exhausted. And she hasn't actually finished anything.

Ines isn't bad at focus. She's just running into a hard limit — a bottleneck built into every human brain. Including yours.

The Staggering Gap

Your senses are taking in an enormous amount of information right now. Light hitting your retinas. Sounds in the room. The pressure of your body against the chair. Temperature. Smells. The position of your limbs.

Researchers estimate this adds up to roughly 11 million bits of information per second flowing into your brain (Zimmermann, 1989).

How much of that reaches your conscious awareness?

About 50 bits per second. Maybe up to 120 on a good day.

That's not a bottleneck. That's a pinhole.

The Global Workspace

So what determines which 50 bits make it through?

Neuroscientist Bernard Baars proposed an answer in the 1980s, which Stanislas Dehaene later developed with brain imaging evidence. They call it the Global Workspace Theory (Baars, 1988; Dehaene et al., 1998).

Think of your brain like a theater. Most of the activity happens backstage — countless specialized processors working in parallel, handling vision, sound, memory, movement, emotion. All of it unconscious. All of it simultaneous.

But there's only one stage. One spotlight. And only one pattern can be broadcast to the whole theater at a time.

Consciousness isn't a continuous stream. It's a series of broadcasts — one thing at a time entering the global workspace, becoming available to all your brain's systems, then yielding to the next.

What This Explains

Back to Ines

She's not failing at multitasking. She's succeeding at rapid task-switching — and paying the price.

Every time she shifts from email to call to Slack, her brain has to reload context. Recall where she was. Figure out what matters. By the time she's oriented, she's switching again. No single task ever gets the sustained attention it needs to be done well.

Understanding the bottleneck doesn't make it wider. But it does change how you work with it.

Try This: Honor the Spotlight

For one hour today, give a single task the entire stage. Not 'most' of your attention — all of it. Close the tabs. Silence the notifications. Let the spotlight rest.

Then notice: what happens to the quality of your thinking?

The bottleneck isn't a bug. It's a feature. It forces prioritization. The question is whether you're choosing what gets the spotlight — or letting the loudest ping decide.

Going Deeper

Knowing about the bottleneck helps. But some patterns — anxiety, rumination, self-criticism — hijack the spotlight whether you want them to or not. They win the competition for the workspace automatically, leaving little room for what actually matters.

At AATAM Studio, we work with this — helping surface the patterns that dominate your workspace, so you can reclaim what gets the spotlight.

Curious? Explore the app.

The Takeaway

Your brain processes millions of bits per second. You're aware of a tiny fraction. Understanding this bottleneck — the global workspace, the single spotlight — changes how you approach attention, work, and even insight itself.

References

Baars, B. J. (1988). A cognitive theory of consciousness. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Core

Dehaene, S., & Changeux, J. P. (1998). A neuronal model of a global workspace in effortful cognitive tasks. PNAS, 95(24), 14529–14534. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.95.24.14529

Dehaene, S., & Changeux, J. P. (2011). Experimental and theoretical approaches to conscious processing. Neuron, 70(2), 200–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2011.03.018

Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. PNAS, 106(37), 15583–15587. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0903620106

Zimmermann, M. (1989). The nervous system in the context of information theory. In R. F. Schmidt & G. Thews (Eds.), Human Physiology (pp. 166–173). Springer. Springer Link