People sometimes ask me how I get anything done with so many things going on at once. Right now I have eight work projects in various stages, a blog, a scout camp planner I built on a weekend, and a Minecraft mob farm I am theorizing about with my kids. From the outside it looks like chaos. From the inside it is the only system that works for me.
My brain does not do well with one thing at a time. When I get stuck on a problem, I cannot just sit there and push through. The harder I try, the less happens. But if I switch to something else, something completely different, my brain keeps chewing on the first problem in the background. I will be formatting a spreadsheet or reviewing a PR and suddenly the answer to the thing I was stuck on three hours ago just appears. That does not happen if I stay in the same document staring at the same paragraph.
The trick is that most of my projects involve waiting. Waiting for a reply, a review, a decision from someone else. That dead time used to frustrate me. Now it is the system. When project A is blocked, I pick up project B. When B needs input, C is ready. By the time I circle back to A, the reply is there and my brain has had enough distance to see it fresh. I am not multitasking. I am rotating through focused sprints with built-in recovery time between them.
If you work like this too, stop apologizing for it. The guilt of “not focusing” is based on a model of productivity that was never designed for brains like ours. Having five things going is not a lack of discipline. It is the discipline, just shaped differently.
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