Is it OK to multitask in meetings?

Multitasking in a meeting is OK when the meeting only needs you to be reachable, risky when it needs you to contribute, and rude when it needs you to lead. Most people get into trouble in the middle case, and it’s rarely because they did other work. It’s because their name came while they were elsewhere and getting back in was slow.

So the useful question isn’t “should I multitask?” On a day of back-to-back calls you will, at least sometimes. The useful questions are which meetings can take it, how to be open about it, and how to make the trip back cheap.

You’re not multitasking, you’re switching

Listening to a conversation and writing a message both use the same limited attention, so you can’t really do both at once. What feels like multitasking is fast switching: a few seconds on the email, a few on the call, back to the email.

The cost of each switch isn’t when you look away. It’s when you look back and have to rebuild where the conversation is. That rebuild is what context switching in meetings means, and it’s harder in a meeting than anywhere else, because the conversation doesn’t wait for you. While you were finishing a sentence, the discussion moved on. Whatever you were holding about it lived only in your working memory, and the other task just pushed it out.

Feeling good at multitasking doesn’t help much either. A well-known 2009 Stanford study (Ophir, Nass and Wagner) found that people who multitasked heavily were, if anything, worse at switching between tasks than people who rarely did. Practice makes it feel smoother. It doesn’t make the cost go away.

Three kinds of meeting, three answers

What decides whether multitasking is OK is your role in the meeting, not the meeting’s size or how important it sounds.

Your role in this meeting	Multitask?	Why
Leading: you’re running it, presenting, or the decision is yours	No	People are talking to you. Divided attention shows, and it slows everyone else down
Contributing: you’ll be asked for input, but you don’t know when	Carefully, with a fast way back in	This is where you get caught. Light work only, and listen for your cues
On standby: you’re there in case something comes up (big syncs, all-hands, demos, FYI calls)	Yes, openly	Nobody expects your full attention. Being reachable is the job

The catch is that meetings change category without warning. A standby meeting becomes a contributing one the moment someone says “actually, Sam, didn’t your team look at this?” That’s the moment multitasking is judged by, so the rest of this page is mostly about getting that moment right.

What makes multitasking rude

Doing other work in a meeting isn’t rude in itself. Plenty of meetings expect it. What people notice is when it costs them something:

• Asking them to repeat what they just said, or a long “sorry, can you say that again?” when your name comes.
• Re-opening a point that was settled while you were elsewhere.
• Visibly doing something else when someone is presenting to you, on camera, in a meeting where you’re the audience that matters.
• Typing while unmuted.
• Hiding it and getting caught. That costs more trust than saying so would have.

None of these are about the multitasking itself. They’re about being slow or wrong when you come back, or about not being straight with people. Fix those and most of the rudeness goes.

How to multitask in a meeting without losing the thread

1. Say so

On a standby call, a line in the chat is enough: “Heads-down on the incident, I’m listening for my name.” It sets expectations, gives people permission to use your name first, and removes the awkwardness if you’re slow to answer. It’s also simply honest, which is the right default for anything you do in a meeting.

2. Pick work you can drop

Messages, triage, reviewing something light, tidying a doc: work you can abandon mid-sentence without losing much. Avoid deep work like writing, designing or debugging. That kind of work makes each switch expensive in both directions, and you’ll do a worse job of it and the meeting.

3. Listen for your cues, not the whole conversation

You don’t need every word on a standby call. You need to notice your name, your project, your team, and phrases that signal a decision is coming: “so are we agreed”, “any objections”, “who owns this”. If you run meetings, say people’s names before the question (“Priya, on the rollout: are we still on for Thursday?”). It gives them a sentence to tune in.

4. Keep a fast way back in

This is the step that decides whether multitasking works. When your name comes, you have about two seconds before the pause gets awkward. Here’s what each option gives you in those two seconds:

Way back in	What you get when your name comes	Live during the call?	Bot in the call?	Catch
Memory alone	Whatever you happened to catch	Yes	No	Often empty after a switch
Live captions	The last line or two, word for word	Yes	No	Scrolls past. Doesn’t tell you the topic
Live transcript tools	Every word since the start	Yes	Often (some tools read captions instead)	Too much to read in two seconds
Live rolling summary (Canary)	What’s being discussed now, plus the last 2 or 5 minutes, in a sentence or two	Yes	No, it captures your system audio	Paraphrases, so check exact figures
Asking for a recap	A recap, at everyone else’s expense	Yes	No	It’s the thing people find rude
After-meeting AI notes	Nothing yet	No, they arrive after the call	Often	Too late for this moment

The gap between a transcript and a summary matters most here. A transcript has everything, but finding your place in it takes longer than you have. The difference between a live transcript and a live summary explains why.

5. Have a line ready for when you’re caught anyway

Even with all this, sometimes you’ll be lost. Ask for the question, not a recap: “Sorry, I lost the last bit. Can you give me the question again?” It’s short, honest and normal. What to say when you’re called on and weren’t listening has more lines that work, and a few to avoid.

Where Canary fits

Canary is a real-time, bot-free meeting summarizer. It captures your computer’s system audio (no bot in the call, no plugin) and shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary — from what’s being said right now to the whole call — so you can catch up the instant your name is called.

For multitasking, that means:

• Leave it in the corner while you work. Canary runs as a small always-on-top window. You can collapse it to a pill that shows the current one-line summary and the meeting timer, so you can see roughly where things are without leaving the other task.
• When your name comes, read “now.” One or two sentences on what’s being discussed right now is usually enough to answer instead of asking.
• If the topic changed while you were away, switch to the last 2 or 5 minutes. That’s the rolling summary idea: the recent past, condensed and kept up to date. The time spans are what make it a multi-resolution summary.
• Before you weigh in on a decision, check the full-call view so your point fits what’s already been agreed.

It works in Zoom, Google Meet, Teams or anything else your computer plays, with headphones, whether or not you’re the host, and nothing joins the call. There’s a free plan (5 meetings a month), and Pro is $15/month.

Some honest limits. The summary paraphrases, so confirm numbers, names and commitments before acting on them. On long calls the full-call view leans toward the most recent part of the discussion. And if you share your whole screen, the Canary window shows up in the share, so share a single window instead. How to catch up after stepping away from a call covers the same moment when you’ve been away from your desk, not just in another tab.

If a meeting doesn’t need you live at all, an after-the-meeting notetaker like Granola is the better fit, and you can skip the call. If you want every word on screen during the call, Tactiq is closer to that.

When the honest answer is to leave the meeting

If you multitask through the same meeting every week and nothing goes wrong, the meeting is telling you something: it doesn’t need you live. Ask to be dropped from the invite and get the notes or decisions in writing instead. That frees the slot and saves everyone the pretence. The remote worker’s guide to meeting overload covers cutting meetings in more detail.

And if you multitask because staying with any meeting is hard, that’s a different problem from having too many meetings. Why do I zone out in meetings? and how to stay focused in meetings with ADHD go into it.

Be open about the tools too

If you run live notes of any kind, tell people. Recording and consent rules vary by region, and being transparent is both courteous and the safe default. A bot-free tool doesn’t add a participant to the call, but it still processes what’s said. How to tell participants you’re using an AI notetaker has wording you can borrow.

Bottom line

Multitasking in meetings is OK when you’re on standby, risky when you’re contributing, and not OK when you’re leading. Wherever you are, be open about it, pick work you can drop, listen for your cues, and keep a fast way back in, so that when your name comes, getting back up to speed takes a glance rather than a recap.