The Return of Multitasking

In the early 2020s, a consensus formed: multitasking is a disease of modern work.

Studies showed it tanked productivity, fried focus, and left us exhausted by the surface-level churn of it all. The productivity discourse moved on. We embraced deep work, timeboxing, and monotasking. We nodded along when researchers told us our brains weren’t wired for it.

But here’s what got lost: office workers have been stuck in the wrong kind of multitasking for decades. We’ve been bouncing between scattered tasks, context-switching until our brains gave out, calling it productivity when it was really just exhaustion with better branding. Juggling email threads and expense reports during Zoom calls. Thin, reactive work that felt frantic but never deep.

Then AI arrived. And with it, multitasking is making a dramatic return.

Not as a relic of hustle culture, but as something fundamentally different. The work shifts to orchestrating intelligence. Routing focus. Managing labor that operates at speeds and scales we’ve never had access to before. We’re getting to do what chefs and foremen have always done—orchestrate fast-moving work at the surface, and delegate deep, focused work to skilled hands.

The office worker is becoming both a chef and a foreman.

Chef Mode

The first mode looks like this: four AI tools open at once, each running a different thread. ChatGPT is deep in research on a topic that came up in a client meeting. Gemini is pulling together a news brief, prepping you for a call in twenty minutes. Claude is helping shape a narrative you’re drafting. Copilot is crunching numbers, working through an analysis that would have taken hours by hand.

You’re bouncing between them. Fast. You’re routing—sending queries out, pulling insights back, moving to the next thing while the previous answer lands. It feels frantic, but also strangely energizing. Like you’re conducting multiple conversations at once, and somehow keeping all the threads straight.

This is chef mode.

You’re coordinating ingredients, managing timing, and keeping multiple dishes moving at once. It’s surface-level orchestration—fast, fluid, responsive. The AI handles the execution; you handle the sequencing.

It’s easy to mistake speed for thinking. You’re getting answers quickly, but are you asking the right questions? This is where autopilot thinking hides—in the blur of rapid-fire responses that feel like progress but might just be motion. The risk isn’t that the tools are bad; it’s that this mode can feel so smooth, you forget to pause and think critically about what you’re building.

This is the new hustle, elevated by AI but still surface-level at its core. Which is why the second mode matters more.

Foreman Mode

The second mode feels completely different.

You’re not bouncing between topics anymore with chat-based AI bots. Here, you are using (the promised, still slightly mythical, but quickly, really arriving) AI agents.

You’re routing focus across a single project, distributing work to agents that handle depth while you manage the whole. One coding agent is running a bug hunt, cataloging issues in a panel on the left. Another is working through the list, fixing them one by one. In a separate window, you’ve got one agent building a new feature while another develops a different component entirely.

It’s not frantic. It’s deliberate. You’re delegating real work to systems that can go deep without you. They’re handling the complexity; you’re handling the strategy.

This is foreman mode.

You’re not in the kitchen anymore. You’re on the job site, managing skilled trades. The plumber is running pipe, the electrician is wiring circuits, the framer is building structure. Each one knows their craft. Your job is to make sure they’re working in sync, that the work connects, that the whole thing comes together.

Microsoft calls this the Frontier Firm—a vision of one person managing a fleet of AI agents, each handling specialized work that used to require full teams.

This is the shift that redefines what multitasking actually means.

Managing the Modes

This is what’s coming. The patterns are forming at the edges, where people are working alongside AI agents rather than just AI tools.

For decades, office work meant scattered multitasking—emails during meetings, reports between interruptions. But as AI absorbs execution, something shifts. We get to operate the way chefs and foremen always have: orchestrating work that moves at different speeds, across different layers, without losing the thread.

Multitasking has returned. The form that’s always existed on job sites and in kitchens is now arriving at desks.