You are cooking, listening to a podcast and answering a message, and it feels like all three are going fine. Or the opposite: you sit down to do one thing and cannot stay on it for more than a minute.
Both experiences are common, and they have more in common than they seem to.
Can you actually focus on two things at once?
Not on two things that both need real thought. That is an observation about everyday life rather than a research finding, and it matches how many people experience it when they slow down enough to notice.
What it can feel like is taking turns. Your attention goes to one thing, then the other, and the handover feels smooth enough that it reads as both at once. The seams can show up in the results: a sentence you read twice, a part of the conversation you missed, a step you did out of order.
This is also observation rather than a single study's finding, but it is a useful frame for everything below.
Why does it feel like I can focus on two things at once?
Because some things do not need your focus, and those pair easily with something that does.
Walking while talking, chopping vegetables while listening to music, driving a familiar road while chatting. One of the two may have become automatic through repetition, so it runs in the background while your attention sits on the other. That is a fine way to live.
The trouble can start when both tasks are new, difficult or wordy. Reading an email while someone explains something to you is two language tasks, and they may compete for the same room. The feeling of coping is not a reliable measure of how well each one is actually going.
It also helps to know that a lot of phone use is not prompted from outside. In an observational study of real-life smartphone use, about 89% of smartphone interactions were started by the user rather than prompted by a notification. The study does not say these were task switches.
Source: Heitmayer & Lahlou (2021), Computers in Human Behavior.
What does the research say about people who multitask a lot?
One of the best-known results is an association, so read it carefully.
Ophir, Nass and Wagner (2009) compared heavy and light media multitaskers. The heavy group performed worse on task-switching and on filtering out irrelevant information.
This is a correlation. It does not show that multitasking caused the difference, and it is possible that people who struggle to filter are drawn to more streams of input.
Source: Ophir, Nass & Wagner (2009), PNAS.
What does a notification do to focus?
Fournier and colleagues, in Computers in Human Behavior ("Attention hijacked"), had people do a focus task (a Stroop task) while social media notifications arrived. The notifications caused a brief slowdown in processing, and pupil dilation mirrored it. The size of the effect was tied to how many notifications people got and their checking habits, rather than to their total screen time.
That detail is worth holding on to. It points at the pattern of notifications and checking more than at how long you spend on a screen.
Phone presence alone may also matter. In one study, people did best on working-memory and fluid-intelligence tests with their phone in another room and worst with it on the desk, even when it was silenced and unused. Later replications found smaller or mixed effects, so treat that as suggestive rather than settled.
Source: Ward, Duke, Gneezy & Bos (2017), Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
Why can't I focus on one thing at a time?
Gloria Mark, who studies attention at UC Irvine, reports in her book Attention Span (2023) that in her recent studies the average time people spend on a single screen before switching is about 47 seconds. That is an average measured on a single screen, not a verdict on any one person.
If an unfinished task keeps tugging at you, there is one more finding worth knowing. Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) found that unfinished goals kept intruding on thought until people made a specific plan to complete them.
Source: Masicampo & Baumeister (2011), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
What can you do about it?
A few small moves are worth trying.
- Pair automatic with demanding, not demanding with demanding. Music while folding laundry is fine. A podcast while writing is two language tasks.
- Let one thing run to a natural stop. Aim for the end of a paragraph, a task or a page, not a timer.
- Move the phone out of reach. Not face down on the desk. In another room is another option to try.
- Cut notifications to the ones you would actually want. Fewer interruptions are a simple place to start.
- Make a specific plan for the next step before you switch. It gives the unfinished task somewhere to wait.
- Start with five minutes. If a full hour of focus feels impossible, a short stretch is a fair place to rebuild from.
If you want help with the first few minutes of a break from the phone, Boredom's Daily Reset is a short guided pause you can use for exactly that gap. It is optional, and everything above works without it.
The short version
You can run one automatic thing beside one demanding thing. Two demanding things may take turns, and that is an observation rather than a research finding. The research on heavy multitaskers is an association, and the notification research shows a brief slowdown in one focus task.
If you cannot hold one thing at a time right now, small changes are worth trying: fewer interruptions, the phone further away, and one task allowed to finish.