There are days when I can get to the end of eight very busy hours and wonder what, exactly, I accomplished.

I wasn’t procrastinating. I wasn’t scrolling social media or finding creative ways to avoid the work. I was genuinely busy all day, moving from one thing to another and checking things off the list.

The problem is that those things may have required me to be six completely different people.

I might start the morning thinking strategically about a client project, stop to answer an email, jump into WordPress to fix something on a website, review an invoice, write a piece of content, troubleshoot an automation, return to the client project, and somehow end up in Canva wondering how I got there.

We tend to call that multitasking.

Years ago, I started calling it something else.

Multijobbing.

MULTITASKING ISN’T QUITE THE WHOLE STORY.

Multitasking usually means trying to manage more than one task at a time.

Multijobbing is different.

It happens when running your business requires you to move among entirely different jobs — strategist, marketer, bookkeeper, salesperson, web developer, writer, designer, administrator, tech support, client-service provider, and CEO.

If you own a small business, some version of this probably sounds familiar. Small business owners’ responsibilities tend to expand as the business grows — often without us consciously deciding which roles we want to keep.

There is nothing inherently wrong with it.

In fact, I’m a huge believer in learning how to do things yourself. Some of the most useful skills I have today exist because, at some point, I decided I wanted to understand how something worked rather than immediately hand it to someone else.

Learning can save money. It can make you more resourceful. It can give you greater control over your business. It can help you make better decisions when you eventually do bring in outside support.

And sometimes you do something yourself for the simplest reason of all:

You like doing it.

The question isn’t whether business owners should DIY.

The better question is whether we’re choosing the jobs we do — or simply accumulating them.

BEING CAPABLE DOESN’T MAKE IT YOUR JOB.

One of the strange things about running a business is how quickly I could probably figure that out, but I guess I do that now.

You learn how to update your website because you need to change a paragraph. You learn enough design to make a graphic. You figure out an email platform because you need to send a newsletter. You become reasonably competent at bookkeeping, technology, social media, scheduling, analytics, automation, and a dozen other things because the business needs them and someone has to do them.

Sometimes those experiments become genuinely valuable capabilities.

Sometimes they become jobs you never consciously agreed to keep.

That distinction matters.

There are things I do in my own business that someone else could absolutely do for me. I continue doing some of them because I enjoy the work, because the skill strengthens other work I do, or because staying close to that part of my business helps me make better decisions.

There are other things I have no interest in mastering.

Neither choice is inherently more entrepreneurial.

What matters is that it’s actually a choice.

THEN THERE’S THE COST OF SWITCHING JOBS.

Even when you deliberately choose to wear several hats, there is another piece of multijobbing that’s easy to overlook.

Your brain has to keep changing hats with you.

Writing a thoughtful article requires a different kind of attention than reconciling an expense. Developing a strategy asks something different of you than troubleshooting a form. Creating a new offer uses a different kind of thinking than responding to an administrative email.

The individual tasks may not be especially difficult.

The transitions can be.

Think about what happens when you’re deeply engaged in a piece of work. You’ve found the thread. You know where you’re going. Ideas are connecting. The work has momentum.

Then something interrupts you.

It will take only two minutes, you tell yourself.

Except that two-minute task requires a decision. The decision reminds you of something else. You open another tab. While you’re there, you notice something that needs fixing.

Twenty minutes later, you return to the original project and have to figure out where your brain was before you left.

The interruption may have been small.

The transition wasn’t.

The problem may not be that you’re doing too many things at once. You may be doing too many different jobs in the same hour.

That’s why a day filled with relatively small tasks can sometimes leave us more depleted than several uninterrupted hours of difficult work. It’s also one reason the feeling that there’s never enough time isn’t always a time-management problem.

We aren’t only doing the work.

We’re repeatedly rebuilding the mental context required to do it.

DIY IS A CHOICE. MULTIJOBBING CAN BECOME A DEFAULT.

This is where I think the conversation about doing things yourself sometimes goes wrong.

The choices aren’t:

Do everything yourself.

or

Hire someone to do everything outside your primary expertise.

Most small businesses live somewhere in between.

There may be things you want to learn because the capability will continue to serve you. There may be things you need to do yourself right now because paying someone else simply isn’t practical. There may be things you genuinely love doing even though they aren’t technically your “job.”

And there may be things you’re still doing for no better reason than you started doing them three years ago and never stopped.

That’s the part worth examining.

Before automatically adding another responsibility to your role, ask:

Can I learn this? is only the beginning.

Do I want to learn it?

Will knowing how to do it continue to serve me?

Is this a good use of my time and attention right now?

Does doing it myself support the business I’m trying to build?

Or am I taking on another job simply because I haven’t stopped to consider whether I should?

Sometimes the answer will absolutely be, Yes. I want this one.

Great.

Intentional capability-building can be incredibly empowering.

But there’s a difference between deliberately expanding what you know how to do and becoming the permanent holder of every job your business has ever needed.

LOOK AT THE JOBS, NOT JUST THE HOURS.

When I first wrote about multijobbing years ago, I encouraged people to do a time study.

I still think there’s enormous value in seeing where your time actually goes. But these days, I’d zoom out a little further.

I wouldn’t only ask:

What did I spend my time doing?

I’d ask:

What did my business ask me to be?

Look at a typical week and identify the roles you moved through.

How much time did you spend doing the work you built the business to do? How much went toward operating it? How much went toward learning? Maintaining? Fixing? Marketing? Administering? Deciding?

Which roles energize you?

Which have become valuable capabilities?

Which constantly pull you away from work that requires deeper attention?

Which could be grouped together so you aren’t switching in and out of them all day?

Which could be simplified, automated, delegated, delayed, or eliminated?

And which jobs have you been doing for so long that you’ve stopped noticing they’re jobs at all?

This isn’t an argument for outsourcing everything.

It’s an argument for alignment.

YOUR ROLE IS ALLOWED TO CHANGE.

The collection of jobs you carried when your business began doesn’t have to be the collection you carry forever.

Early on, doing almost everything yourself may be exactly what the business requires. Later, some of those skills may become permanent parts of your role. Others may become things you understand well enough to oversee. Some may be handed off entirely.

And some may simply stop needing to exist.

As your business changes, your job inside it should be allowed to change, too.

That doesn’t necessarily mean doing less.

It means becoming more deliberate about what deserves you.

Your time, attention, experience, creativity, judgment, and energy are all finite resources. Every job you take responsibility for uses some portion of them — even when you’re perfectly capable of doing the work.

So before you try to become faster, more productive, or better at juggling everything, it may be worth asking whether everything you’re juggling still belongs in your hands.

You don’t necessarily need to stop doing things yourself.

You may simply need to decide which things you’re choosing to keep.