Stop Juggling

Thursday morning, May 2023. The days are getting shorter. 7am, still dark, and I'm on my second call of the day. A 1-on-1 with my manager.

I'm helping drive a brand new product.

I've got consensus on the architecture. The roadmap still needs reconciling. Half a dozen people still need aligning. Every conversation forks into three more. The whole shape of the thing lives in my head, and every time I switch context something wobbles.

I'm overwhelmed.

She asks how I'm doing. I rattle through it. The roadmap, the alignment, the people I haven't reached, the dependencies that haven't surfaced. Finally I land on, "I'm juggling a lot at the moment"

I catch myself mid-sentence. My hands are doing the action.

She looks at me on the screen.

"Why don't you put them down?"

I'd been describing my situation as if the juggling was the work. It wasn't. The juggling was the cost of holding everything in my head. Out of the air, the balls were just stuff. A list. A doc. A page. They stopped spinning. They sat where I put them.

I haven't really juggled since.