Divided Attention

You’ve been waiting two months to get time on your boss’s calendar. Between travel, meetings, and last-minute cancellations, your one-on-one keeps getting bumped. Now, finally, you have thirty minutes to pitch the idea you’ve been working on for weeks. Knowing their style, you build a short, focused presentation: five slides, clean bullets, the key ask up front. You even rehearse aloud—once to your dog, twice in the mirror—so you can keep it tight.

The meeting starts on time, and your boss smiles as they join the video call. “Excited to hear what you’ve got for me,” they say. “Let’s dive in.” You share your screen and begin the pitch.

But less than a minute in, you notice your boss’s eyes flick downward—then linger. Their hands move slightly out of frame. It’s subtle, but unmistakable: they’re checking their phone.

You pause. “Do you need a minute before I continue?”

“No, I’m listening,” they reply, without looking up. “Please, go ahead.”

So you do. You keep your pace, walk through the slides, and make your final ask. When you stop sharing your screen, there is a beat of silence. Then your boss looks up and asks, “How much is this going to cost?”

You feel disappointed. That information was clearly presented on slide two.

Your boss missed that key detail because of their divided attention: they were trying to juggle listening to your pitch while checking their phone, but ended up not fully processing either. Even though they were physically present and responded in the moment, their cognitive resources were split and reduced.

Our brain’s ability to process multiple streams of information at once is limited. When we try to focus on more than one thing, our performance on both tasks tends to drop. In high-stakes settings, even a brief lapse in attention can lead to trouble. 

In other words, multitasking doesn’t work—at least not well. Understanding the limits of divided attention helps explain why knocking out a couple of things at once is rarely as effective as it seems, and why fully focusing on one task at a time is sometimes a better choice.