You, me, and everyone we know cannot multitask. Yes, it is a myth.

People may appear to be doing may tasks at the same time, but our brains can only pay attention to one thing at a time. When someone is simultaneously on the phone, listening to music, sending instant messages, checking email, and writing a report they are not multitasking. They are sequentially switching their attention from one task to the next very rapidly, and this would be fine but for some nasty consequences.

1. Interruptions cause errors and waste time. Interruptions force your brain to jettison one set of task-related rules for another and scrap your working memory. It is what generates that frustrating shoot-where-was-I feeling when you’ve been interrupted in the middle of writing a paragraph or planning a product launch. Give yourself blocks of time that are interruption free (hide if you have to). You’ll get things done, faster, and with fewer errors.

2. Good Decisions Require Focus. Working memory is what we use to hold information while we analyze it. Visual thinking tools free up, and in a way expand, working memory by holding some of this information. Spreading working memory across several tasks means we can consider less information per task during the analysis that leads to good decisions.

3. Memory requires attention. Attention, especially when combined with strong emotion, helps our brains to decide what to store in long-term memory. If you’re working on something you’ll need to remember, disconnect and focus on it.

4. Unfamiliar tasks require full attention. Much of what happens in the brain involves pattern recognition. Unfamiliar tasks demand more attention and consideration because we don’t have many patterns to draw from memory and adapt to the task at hand. Problem solving and other creative activities transform familiar tasks to unfamiliar tasks.

Solutions: Organize tasks for one-at-a-time completion. Turn down the world and minimize interruptions by switching off programs, devices, and, um, people unrelated to your task. Novel tasks need more of your brain so save your rapid sequential attention switching — misnamed multitasking — for familiar tasks where completion time and error rates don’t concern you (a fairly short list when you think about it).