August 26, 2025

…because someone said in a meeting to use the lemons to make lemonade and this started shouting in my mind

Kent Beck has a subscriber post called return of Multi-tasking? where he’s realizing he’s more often working on different things across a day now that he’s working with genies. Less time doing clackety-click and more time thinking about next steps (or napping for epiphanies).

I’ve noticed the same pattern, this “productive multi-tasking” where you shift to something else when you’re stuck or “cogitating in the background.” Whether it’s waiting for feedback, getting help from the CI team (why won’t their plugin inject the AWS credentials it’s supposed to?), or just running out of brain juice and needing to let things percolate (which I want to remember Slow Productivity also recommends, especially for more nebulous work).