The fact that many tasks can only be completed half-heartedly at the same time is clearly a reason to forget about multitasking. However, the opposite is also not recommended. We are talking about perfectionism. If you constantly check your work, and attach excessive importance to details that are actually negligible, this costs time and energy, and probably won’t be worth it. The Pareto principle can also be applied here: if 20 percent of the input already accounts for 80 percent of the output, the remaining 80 percent of the workload is only responsible for 20 percent of the result.
To prioritize your workload as efficiently as possible, you should be content to do many jobs “well,” and not perfectly. This is often better than focusing all of your energy on a single task, while all the other work gets piled up. To do this, however, you must accept the fact that errors can happen. Be open to criticism and learn from it, instead of wasting your time trying to deliver a perfect result right from the start, and be happy with something that is good enough.
Filtering your to-do list by “urgent” and “important” is already a step in the right direction. After all, you have to be aware that you can only do damage control in any case – at the end of the day or week some points on your plan will probably still be unchecked.