I'm multitasking right now, spinning disks on Dharmawheel Media Music thread, and writing on one of my favorite topics. Multitasking puts things in a stereo or synesthesia effect, it's why you can't remember even how you got there later, it's the conjunction of several streams of experience at once. It's got an important value at the opposite end of the spectrum and is maybe just as important as sati in my opinion.
Sati, often translated as "Mindfulness" actually only means "remember". Remember the breath. Remember to look both ways when crossing the street. Remember your order of operations in maths. It's not a mental function we don't already possess. What's unique in Buddhist meditation is remembering what? The object of meditation. It's a single thing. It's using the object to exercise the remembering. This is how rigorous training in sati leads directly to insight and Wisdom, because it trains us in remembering the Dhamma, and it's lessons. Useless to an untrained mind.
But back to multitasking for a minute: it is the corollary of play, what we did as children. When we were children, we exercised the ability to lose ourselves in play, which is essentially shedding the ego. Nothing in the Dhamma is without the elements we have in ordinary life, but it is having them discipline us in skillful means. Gradually, everything becomes the Path, because it is the Path.
In the Rose-Apple story, both sati and play are elements leading to jhana. Eventually, Siddhartha remembered this.
MN 36 PTS: M i 237
Maha-Saccaka Sutta: The Longer Discourse to Saccaka translated from the Pali by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
"I thought: 'I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then — quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities — I entered & remained in the first jhana: rapture & pleasure born from seclusion, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation. Could that be the path to Awakening?' Then following on that memory came the realization: 'That is the path to Awakening.' I thought: 'So why am I afraid of that pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality, nothing to do with unskillful mental qualities?'
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.036.than.html