MBA1732 Is Multitasking Killing Your Business? + Free Ride Friday
2 Feb 2026 · 10 min
Omar Zenhom argues multitasking destroys productivity and walks through how to fix it: assign one priority per task, run daily standups, set micro-goals, and build momentum through completion. Plus a Free Ride Friday giveaway for the Easy Course.
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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Your go To Business podcast for Straight to the Point business lessons every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the founder of an independent software company called Webinar Ninja, started back in 2014 with my partner and today's episode is Free Riot Friday. On Free Riot Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away Easy Course, our course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. You can check it out over at EasyCourse. So if you want to win free access a course that is retailed at $500, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that easy. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. In today's lesson we're going to discuss is multitasking killing your business? Are you encouraging multitasking not only in your own personal workflow, but in your actual business, amongst your teammates, with your employees? Many people believe that multitasking is a great skill to have, that it's efficient, that it's practical. I'm here to tell you it is not. Multitasking can really crush your business goals. It can really hinder you from moving forward fast enough. Have you ever felt your business is just not growing fast enough? Things aren't changing at a rapid pace that is taking forever to build that new feature or release that new product or get that new marketing campaign out. The cause can very well be because you're multitasking every step of the way. And I'll explain why this is killing your business. I'll also show you how you can stop doing this and how you can instill a culture of focus and a culture of being completionists in your business. You want your team to get momentum, and momentum is done when you have small wins one after another. That's very hard to achieve achieve when you're multitasking. So we're going to get into this very, very big topic. This single shift in mindset and culture in your business can make a huge difference in your bottom line and in your growth. So listen up and implement what we talk about in today's episode. You will not regret it. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.
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Few years ago in my software company, Webinar Ninja, I started to realize that many of our team members were really scattered. They weren't getting things done efficiently. We would have a meeting after meeting and every time we met, their to do lists would get longer and longer. And the things they said they would get done by the next meeting was not done yet. We were moving at a snail's pace in every department. And I started to realize that I'm just giving my team very unstructured work. I'm just giving them a bunch of tasks, a bunch of goals to hit. And I'm saying go at it. And what's happening is that when you do this with your team, they can't help but feel the urge to work on multiple things at a time. Now you might be saying, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with working on many things at one time? I do this all the time. Well, it's not the most efficient way to work and this has been proven time and time again. You can do a ton of research on this online, but I've done my own research. You can check it out. You can look at Cal Newport's work. His book Deep Work is a masterpiece. His TED Talk is also worth watching. But let's take an example. Let's say you give your marketing department or your marketing person three things to do. I want you to run Facebook ads, I want you to also run an affiliate contest, and I want you to redo all our email automations for email marketing. When you tell somebody to do all three things and give them no structure, what happens is that they do something from each task every single day because they feel overwhelmed. They want to do everything and they want to show you progress in each of those tasks. Now, on its surface, you might be like, oh, what's wrong with that? Well, the problem is that you're wasting a lot of time when you're switching from one task to the next. And this is called context switching. And it's very, very costly. If you're working on one thing and then you switch over to another, it takes you some time to readjust your brain to get into the groove of this new task, to get into the zone. Being in the zone and working on a project is high, high value time. You don't want to take that away from somebody. In fact, you want to keep them in the zone for as long as possible. But when people are working on multiple things at one time, they get in the zone, they get disrupted, they have to get into the zone of the next task. That's a little bit of time. And then they get disrupted again, and then they have to get into the zone again. Not only is this taking a lot of time, but it's very draining. It actually drains energy. So what happens is that they come to the next meeting and they're like, this is my progress. And it's actually very little progress for each of the three tasks. They feel like they worked so hard, but they really didn't make much progress. The problem with this is that they never get any momentum. Now let's compare this to if you do focus work and you don't multitask, instead of telling your marketing person, I want you to do three things, you say, listen, there are three things we want to accomplish. The first thing we're going to accomplish is the only thing you're going to focus on and you're going to get it done by the end of the week. And that's running a Facebook ads campaign. This is all you got to focus on. This is the goal, this is the criteria. This is the outcome we're looking for. What happens is that they just stay in the zone in that task day in and day out until they complete it. They come back the next week and say, hey, I finished that task. It's done. Here are the results. Already they're working on a different, different level. They have momentum, they have a win. They completed something, and then they can shut their brain off from that task and work on the next task you're going to give them. This needs to be done in every department, with every kind of work you do in your business. This is up to you as a leader to build this into your culture. And I realized this a few years ago and it really allowed me to be a lot more efficient with my team. Sometimes you're going to have to remind your team that not to jump around even when you give them prescribed instructions. I do this with our engineers. I have a daily standup with engineers. Every single day we meet for 15 minutes, we talk about what they're going to work on today. They actually first talk about what they worked on yesterday and then what they're going to work on today, and then we really get laser focused. This is all you need to worry about today. This is the focus for today. This is the goal. This is the win. Why? That way, when they come to the meeting tomorrow, when they come to the standup, they feel proud. This is what I worked on yesterday. I got it done. We gotta win. We can mark it off. And I love showing numbers to show the progress. Okay, now we work on the next task. Multitasking doesn't allow for momentum. Multitasking doesn't allow you to get wins and give them motivation to keep going. It holds you back, it holds your team all back. So you want to make sure you stay away from it at all costs. If you don't believe me, if you feel like, wow, I can't really see the benefit of this, give it a try for two weeks. Weeks and tell me the results. You can email me at omar100mba.net I guarantee you you're going to see a total shift of momentum and progress in velocity of work and getting things done.
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To wrap up today's lesson, it's not only important for you to be efficient and not to multitask and to focus and get into deep work. You have to lead by example. And then you have to coach your team because this is a really interesting challenge for your business. It's really hard to break these old habits of multitasking, but if you coach your team through it like I showed you with my daily standups, it really helps your team feel like they're making progress because they see it, they're completing tasks. Give them those wins that they deserve. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show, but today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. We have to see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. 14 IM 14 IM says over here from Spotify. 5 stars. I listen to the show on Spotify, but I had to come over here to leave a five star review after the last hundred dollars NBA show episode with Jas Takar episode 1723. Thank you for the valuable information to improve my business. Sincerely, a local bar owner. Well 14 I am. You are our free ad Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at omar100nba.net so I can hook you up with the life membership to easy course. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review just like you heard today and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that easy. And while I gotcha, smash that subscribe button and take a screenshot and share your love for the 100 MBA show with your friends and family on social media. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Old habits die hard, so ignore. It's something you're going to have to enforce and reinforce on a daily basis to get people out of multitasking. Set them up with micro goals and give them the license to only work on one thing. Tell them this is all you have to worry about. Don't do anything else other than this. Once it's completed, come back to me. We'll do the next step. Once they get into that habit after about a month into it, then you can start giving them more of a big picture and say, okay, these are the next three steps. But hey, we're not doing all three steps at once. We're only going to do this this week, this one next week, this one the week after. This is going to really change the velocity of your team. Give it a try. You won't regret it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.
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