The Diary of a CEO: Stop Multitasking, Reclaim an Hour a Day with Dr Sahar Yousef

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

So I just finished listening to Steven Bartlett's conversation with Sahar Yousef, and wow, she comes in hot with a warning: multitasking is a myth. Right, and that's just the opening shot. Her larger fear is about what our digital dependence is doing to society as a whole. But she makes one central case throughout the entire episode: distracted living is expensive, and the bill shows up in time, energy, and meaning. Let's start with the cost of switching attention. Every time someone jumps between tasks, Sahar says they pay a biological price. We're talking about people losing hours a day to screen-hopping and context switching. And her solution is fascinating. She calls it "reverse neuroscience," basically a set of small changes that reduce stimulation instead of increasing it. The simplest one? Grayscale mode. In her lab, people who used grayscale spent about one hour less on their phones each day.

That's a concrete result. But she also emphasizes foundations, right? She argues that sleep comes first, because less than seven hours a night damages both cognitive performance and emotional regulation. Exactly. After sleep comes digital hygiene. And here's the kicker: the default settings on phones and apps are designed by behavioral neuroscientists to maximize engagement, not to protect the user. Her advice is to create VIP notifications, keep only essential contacts able to break through, and treat everything else like mail waiting in a mailbox.

What strikes me is how this connects to a larger psychological point. Sahar says many people aren't just addicted to stimulation, they're also trying to escape discomfort. Notifications, short-form videos, constant checking, it all becomes a "fast exit from reality." She even mentions that some people would rather shock themselves than sit in silence. The phone becomes a way to avoid overwhelm, loneliness, or stress.

But they also discuss focus as a deeply social skill.

Steven describes his husband as a default "no" person, someone who protects time and attention.

And Sahar connects that to figures like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, saying the real skill is saying no even to good ideas. As she puts it, the key is not just increasing signal, but decreasing noise.

From there, she gets practical with systems for deep work. She calls it a focus sprint: schedule it, define the task clearly, break it into tiny pieces, and know the exact outcome before starting. Most people waste energy deciding what to do next in the middle of work. But then she widens the lens to meaning. She talks about Most Important Tasks, future-self thinking, even deathbed reflection. She quotes Bronnie Ware's hospice insight: "I wish I had lived a life true to myself, and cared less about what others thought."

That's the turning point in the episode. By the end, Sahar is warning about a future where attention is so fractured that only a small "thinking class" keeps its ability to reason deeply. Her final message is blunt but hopeful:

measure your digital dependence, protect your mind, and remember Kahneman's line, "Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it, but they would prefer not to."