As much as everybody—starting from productivity gurus, bloggers, YouTubers, authors, advisors, conference speakers, and ballroom attendees—would like to tell us how unproductive it is, multitasking is here to stay.

In a utopia you can set your own schedule, beat resistance, get into a state of flow, and get things done by following a set of ideas, principles, guidelines, and hacks. Unless you are delusional you are pretty sure this isn’t the case in the real world. Real world is very different from the one painted in productivity books.

Maybe the people with these grand ideas have the luxury of setting their own schedule. Their ideas may apply to a niche who have the same luxury, but us common folks don’t have much of a choice, do we?