Manish's – Thoughts and Learnings

For the better part of two decades, I have sat through enough leadership workshops to know one universal truth: “multi-tasking is a myth”. Every trainer, every TED talk, every LinkedIn “thought leader” has said it with the confidence of a scientist announcing gravity – “the human brain cannot do two things at once, it only switches rapidly between them, and badly”.

I believed it. I lived it.

Then Copilot and Co-work entered, and suddenly the myth needed a rewrite.

The Help I Didn’t Know I Was Missing

Let’s be honest – a large chunk of our so-called “high value” corporate day is actually low value, high volume. Market research that means reading forty tabs and forgetting thirty-eight of them. Internal research that means messaging three colleagues, two of whom “will get back to you” (translation: never). Drafting the same polite, but firm response to the fifth vendor who didn’t read the RFP properly. Summarizing a one-hour meeting that could have been a two-line e-mail, except nobody sends two-line emails anymore.

Copilots have quietly taken over this entire buffet of slog. I give it a brief, sometimes messier than I would like to admit, and it comes back with something 70-80% usable – which, if you have managed junior resources, you will recognize as an excellent hit rate. Better onboarding than most humans, frankly, and it never asks for a hike in the next appraisal cycle 😊.

My New Favourite Habit: Delegate and Disappear

Here is a confession that would have sounded like science fiction five years ago: I now hand over a long-running task to my copilot and walk off for lunch. Not “quickly check email while eating” lunch. Actual, sit-down, “beta, thoda aur daal do” type of lunch.

I come back with my tummy full and my task half-done – sometimes fully done, sometimes needing a nudge, but always further along than if I had stayed glued to the screen chewing a sandwich or biryani with one hand and typing with the other like some corporate gymnast.

Same with coffee breaks. I used to feel guilty stepping away from my desk, like the work would notice my absence and file a complaint with HR. Now I just say, “carry on”, to my copilot the way senior people say it to juniors right before disappearing for two hours – except my copilot doesn’t take offence, and it definitely doesn’t gossip about me at the coffee machine.

So What Changed, Really?

Multi-tasking didn’t become possible because our brains suddenly evolved. It became possible because we now have a second brain doing the boring 80% while we focus on the interesting 20% – the actual strategic thinking, the judgement calls, the “should we even build this” conversations that no copilot can have on our behalf (yet, touch wood).

After a long professional career, I have made peace with the fact that I will never truly multi-task in the way those workshops warned us not to. But I have found something better: a colleague who never sleeps, never complains about “scope creep”, and is perfectly happy holding the fort while I hold my coffee cup.

The myth of multi-tasking may still be true for the human brain. For the human-plus-copilot combination? That’s a different case study altogether – and I, for one, am not filing a rebuttal.