How to Juggle Multiple Tasks
For the first time in 2023—my first full year as a senior software engineer, I was leading a project that involved multiple roles: ranking engineers, data engineers, data scientists, product managers, and a few engineering managers (EM). In all of that, there was one thing I struggled with:
- (A) On one hand I had software engineering tasks to complete (i.e., identify solutions and write code for specific, well-defined sub-tasks as part of the project), and
- (B) On the other hand, I had to lead this project (make sure that everyone is well-supported to tackle their well-defined sub-tasks, ensure the overall project is moving along, communicate progress, get support where needed, etc).
Some weeks my time split would be 80% on (A) and 20% on (B), and other weeks it’d be the opposite, 20% on (A) and 80% on (B). Intuitively, I felt something was wrong; I felt I couldn’t get the balance right. I always felt like when I focused on one, the other would lag behind, and I could never make adequate progress on both concurrently.
So, I set up a meeting with the EM lead I was working on the project with, and presented the problem that I was struggling with. To that, he taught me a lesson that I will never forget.
“You should’ve be balancing between two tasks”
Tim argued that it was a red flag that I had to balance between (A) and (B). In times when the two things one is balancing between are substantially large, it’s just nearly impossible to get this balance right because it’s always better to stay focused on one individual task.
The subtasks that I had to do were important yet difficult to accomplish, and at the same time, making sure that the overall project is moving forward was important yet difficult. So, if I am not supposed to be balancing between them, how can I make sure that both important things get done?
Tim’s advice was to reframe the way I saw the problem. Namely, having two goals will inherently always lead to me splitting my time between the goals. It’s better to have a single, well-define goal that guides what needs to be done and what is most important at all times.
In this particular case, (B) was closer to the true goal than (A). I.e., the one thing that I should have been focusing all of my time and attention was to make sure that the overall project was successful. Knowing that to be my goal, every week my objective would then become: do the thing that makes brings the most progress towards this single goal.
- If the thing that will make the most progress is working on an engineer subtask and solving it, then that is what I should be doing.
- If the thing that will make the most progress is finding support for the other engineers working on subtasks, then that is what I should be doing.
- If the thing that will make the most progress is making update posts to keep all interested parties in sync, then I should be making that post.
This way of reframing the problem actually helped me unlock even further goals. Previously, I was only thinking of (A) and (B). However, the most important action to take now can be something else entirely, which, in a way, offered much more ways to maneuvre. For instance, maybe finding someone else to do (A) could be the best action to take.
Another way to look at this, also, is that it’s a prioritization problem. There are cases where a team chooses to work on more than one overall goal, and that can set the team up for failure. It’s much better if everyone, through doing different tasks, is aiming towards a unified goal.
So how do you juggle multiple tasks?
You figure out what is most important either by prioritizing amongst the tasks you have or by combining them into one general purpose that gives you a way to prioritize the most important thing to do is (maybe a combination of these two), and then solely focus on that.
