Chapter 10

The art of juggling

Life is messy and complicated. It’s not just at work where we want to feel more in control, fulfilled and productive, but in all aspects of our lives – our family life, home, personal goals, community projects, voluntary work, hobbies, social life. Different roles, multiple projects and competing priorities in our work and personal life rarely form an orderly queue and wait for our attention (as much as we would like them to).

Do you multitask or compartmentalise? Do you do it all yourself or do you ask for help? Juggling is something we all have to do, so let’s explore what it takes for you to juggle all that’s important to you.

Multitasking: magic or myth?

Multitasking. Some people love it, others hate it. Some see it as necessity, given the multiple roles, responsibilities, commitments and projects we juggle. But does it actually work?

First things first, multitasking is not actually multitasking. When we try and perform two tasks simultaneously, what we’re really doing is switching and rapidly refocusing between tasks, and while it might feel productive, each switch costs us in time, attention and productivity – sometimes just a few tenths of a seconds, sometimes much more. (Remember the Microsoft experiment? 1 minute interruption = average 15-minute recovery?) This is especially true when we’re repeatedly switching back and forth between tasks. Research suggests that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 per cent of your productive time.¹

Something I spotted on Twitter a while ago often rings a bell: ‘I feel like I have too many tabs open in my head!’ Every time I mention it in a talk or a workshop, I see eyes light up and heads nodding furiously: ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I feel!’. What happens when we’ve got too many tabs open on our computer? It slows down, crashes or stops working. It’s also easier to get distracted when we’re clicking between tabs – to accidentally click on the wrong tab or let something shiny catch our eye and end up going off on a tangent. Have you ever been closing down your tabs and windows at the end of the day, only to find that one email you forgot to press send on first thing in the morning?

It’s much easier to make mistakes when we’re multitasking. A few years ago I was writing Christmas cards while Catherine, my very excited three-year-old, was asking me repeatedly, ‘Is it Christmas yet, Mummy? Is it Christmas yet, Mummy? Is it Christmas yet, Mummy?’ with the unwavering enthusiasm, energy and volume that only a three-year-old has – and I found myself signing off one card with ‘Lots of love, Grante, Grace, Oliver and Christmas’. It’s not hard to write a Christmas card! But it’s very easy to make a mistake when you are switching your focus between different things.

Have you ever sent an email to the wrong person? Or, worse, sent it to the person you were talking about rather than the person you wanted to talk to? One workshop delegate I worked with once responded to this question with ‘Um… we don’t talk about that.’ Oops.

The worst multitasking mistake I’ve come across so far is the case of Tomasz Paczkowski, a man who, in trying to prove a point to his wife, decided to multitask by doing the ironing while watching TV and drinking a beer at the same time. It was all going well until he got so involved in the boxing on the TV that, when the phone rang, he picked up the iron and pressed it to his ear. Ouch! So, multitasking can be bad for your health as well as your productivity!

If you came to my house at breakfast time, you might argue that multitasking is a necessity but, believe me, it doesn’t take much – one spilt drink, one squabble, one child suddenly remembering they’re supposed to be wearing something blue that day – for me to burn the toast or put the dishwasher tablet in the coffee. So, yes, sometimes the world doesn’t form an orderly queue to wait for our full attention and we do have to juggle multiple tasks from time to time, but be aware that when your attention is split, nothing is getting your full and best attention. Give yourself a break and don’t throw in any more balls to juggle than you have to.

Is there ever a good time to multitask?

There are times when I find splitting my attention can be quite useful. When I’m running, I like to listen to a podcast or catch up on a talk, because it helps to take my mind off my aching legs. Lately I’ve taken to running with a friend, and we’ve found that it’s a great way to catch up and have a natter while getting fit, and it saves us cash and calories from the coffee and cake we’d be having otherwise. Plus, there’s an added bonus of the accountability you get when you know that someone’s going to be knocking on your door at 7 am to go for that run.

Other ways of killing two birds with one stone can include:

• walking meetings
  
• breakfast or lunch meetings (although don’t give up all your breaks this way!)
  
• arranging to meet someone at an event or immediately before/after to cut down on travelling
  
• car sharing or travelling to an event together
  
• reading a book on the train
  
• listening to audio books while commuting
  
• watching a video while on the treadmill (only on a treadmill; this doesn’t work on the road!)
  
• recording a conversation or talk and having it transcribed for an article
  
• taking your ideas into the bath – and keeping bath crayons handy to capture any bright ideas (a friend of mine uses eyeliner to write on the tiles, but that seems a bit expensive to me!)
  
• turning chores into activities for the children (oh, just me?)
  
• batching ‘out and about’ errands to complete together (e.g., buying stamps for work and a birthday card for your mum or posting something you sold on eBay at the same time as your latest customer samples)
  
• business meetings in play areas when all parties are juggling childcare – I wouldn’t recommend it for all occasions, but there was a time when I used to run child-friendly networking meetings where our kids played in the same room, and I also held a coaching session once with a client on a beach while our children entertained themselves happily by the water, and I’m pretty sure the scenery did us good too!
  

Compartmentalising: also sounds better than it works!

While my natural tendency is to take on too much and try and do too many things together, my husband goes the other way. If he had his way, life would be neatly compartmentalised into separate areas: family, work, study, friends, house, health (and probably gadgets would have its own compartment, too), where everything has its place and time and could be balanced. That way he would always know where he stood, what mode or role he needed to be in and where his priority and focus was at any given time.

Unfortunately for him, life doesn’t really work like that either. We made the decision for him to take a sabbatical from work this year so that he could do his Master’s degree full time, because we knew that trying to juggle part-time study, full-time work and family commitments would just be hell for him. Even so, he still finds studying with family commitments hard.

It’s not just the time he spends at lectures, it’s the reading, research, essays and projects that need to be completed in between. Even when the children are at school and I’m working away, he says he’s still not able to completely switch off family and bury himself in study, as mentally he’s still on standby in case the school calls.

Sometimes life is messier than we would like. Children get ill. Global conference calls, travel or a work crisis might call on you outside of normal office hours. Different areas of our lives cross over and overlap and sometimes that’s a good thing: a work contact you call on in your school governor position or a lesson learned in parenting that applies equally well to contract negotiations. When the different facets of our lives work well together, they enhance each other. Being good at what I do, being on fire and on purpose at work, makes me a better parent. And I can’t count the number of productivity lessons I’ve learned from being a parent. As Anne-Marie Slaughter said in her TED talk:²

I’m often asked in workshops if I would recommend having separate diaries, to-do lists and ‘second brain’ systems for work and home life. My answer is this: we take the same brain to work as we do to home. So it’s natural that ideas, nags and reminders may come up at work that need dealing with at home, and vice versa. It may or may not be appropriate to deal with at work in that moment, but if we carry it around in our heads until we get home, it takes up even more headspace while we’re at work. Sometimes a home-related thing just might be simpler to deal with in the working day – for example, calls that need to be made during office hours or asking a colleague where he takes his son to play cricket. And, sometimes, home-related things might get triggered off at work – for example, when I get a workshop booking that requires some travel, I might need to make childcare arrangements and discuss logistics with my husband. Being able to access my second brain right there and then and park it in my @home or @grante category means that I can forget about it until I’m in the right context to deal with it later.

Doing it all or doing your all?

The secret to having and doing it all is in the word ‘all’.

It brings out the perfectionist in us. As a new mum, my idea of motherhood was a collection of the best traits I admired in all the mothers I had ever known. Some were amazing cooks, some had the patience of a saint, some were super organised, some looked stunning, some had great careers, some could play with children for hours on end… and I tried to live up to all of those things and more – something that’s just not meant for one person to be. No wonder I never measured up.

Equally, it’s easy to look at an array of successful businesses and see excellence in every field – those who have a creative genius about them, those with killer instincts and impeccable timing, those who could sell snow to the Eskimos, those who are great with numbers, confident speakers, prolific writers, technical whizzes and strategic masterminds.

Each role we take on can have huge potential scope – think of all the different types of doctors there are. Can you imagine one person being an expert in every field of medicine and being able to serve people in all those areas? When there is no definition all definitions can apply, and we can find ourselves trying to fulfil a very wide range of expectations. Many of those can leave us feeling like a square peg in a round hole.

Having it all doesn’t mean being everybody or doing everything. It’s about being you with everything that you’ve got – whatever situation you’re in. Rather than being all things to all people, productivity is as much about what you don’t do as what you do do.

Who are you under all your hats? What makes you you? How would you play your roles differently from everyone else? Remember your strengths and preferences in Chapter 7 and your values in Chapter 1? Use these insights to help shape what your ‘all’ looks like.

Defining your all

If we are going to juggle, to play multiple roles in multiple arenas, we need to be deliberately selective about what each of those roles looks like – for us, personally. Not what it looks like for other people or for our predecessors. Not what it’s always looked like, what others expect it to look like, or what it should look like. It’s time to challenge the status quo, existing assumptions and redefine your role.

Just as specialising in a niche enables a business to be more focused, distinctive and profitable, defining your role will allow you to focus your efforts, to shine brightly rather than spread thinly and feel satisfied and fulfilled rather than have shoes so big that no one could ever fill them. The more tailored your role, the better you can fill it and find fulfilment in it.

Here’s a quick 10-minute exercise you can use to begin to define your roles.

On a piece of paper, draw a 3×3 grid with nine boxes. In each of these boxes, write one of your roles, e.g. husband, accountant, writer, dad.

Now imagine you are at your own funeral and significant people are standing up to talk about you in each of these roles. Or, if that’s too morbid, imagine you’re a fly on the wall at a party and you overhear someone saying nice things about you behind your back. What would you want them to be saying about you? What would be the most meaningful compliment to you?

Back to that piece of paper: in each of the boxes, under each role, write the words ‘I am’ and fill in the word(s) that would most describe how you want to be in that role right now. Give yourself just a few seconds on each one and pick the strongest word that comes to mind quickly. This exercise works best when you don’t overthink it.

Reflecting on what you’ve written, consider:

• When am I most like this? When am I not?
  
• Given what I’ve written here, what does success look like?
  
• What expectations, commitments or tolerations could I let go of to pursue this more freely?
  
• What’s really important to me? What’s not so important?
  
• What can only I do? What can be delegated, renegotiated or released?
  
• What do I need to focus on in this season?
  

Your roles pie

This is another more in-depth exercise I use with clients who are juggling multiple roles.

1. What are your different roles in life? (Choose eight.)
   

   Some might be work-related, such as accountant, trainer or business director. Some might relate to personal relationships, such as friend, family member, partner, parent. Some might relate to hobbies, interests or personal development goals, such as runner, singer, speaker or chef. List them.

   Makes sure you include ‘me’ as one of your eight roles – you need to be your own coach and caretaker as well.

   Is there a fantasy role that you’d like to include? Something you’ve always wanted to do? For example, rally car racer, business owner or novelist.

   You can have only eight roles, so if you have more than eight you might want to combine certain ones, e.g. sister, cousin, daughter might become family member, mountain climber, bungee jumper, and open-water swimmer might become adventurer.

   1. Me (own coach/caretaker)
      
   2. ..................................................
      
   3. ..................................................
      
   4. ..................................................
      
   5. ..................................................
      
   6. ..................................................
      
   7. ..................................................
      
   8. ..................................................
      

   Once you have decided on your eight roles, write them around a circle divided into eight segments.

   

    

2. Where are you right now?
   

   For each section, give yourself a score from 1–10 on how well you’re performing in these roles right now, not compared to anyone else’s standards or expectations, but according to your own definition of success.

3. What does success look like?
   

   For each role, what would a score of 10 look like? What would you like to achieve? Why is that important to you?

4. What would a one-point improvement be? (For example, from three to four or from seven to eight.)
   
5. What’s your primary role for this current season?
   

   What do you want to be paying particular attention to?

   There are times when one role might take centre stage and the other roles might take more of a backstage – still important, but perhaps your focus in those areas might be to keep them nicely ticking over rather than go all out. Pursuing that CEO promotion, preparing for a wedding and training for your first marathon are all worthy goals, for example, but perhaps not ones you would want to pursue at exactly the same time. What takes centre stage right now?

Asking for help

There’s a saying that really riles me:

‘If it’s to be, it’s up to me.’

I know, I know, it’s meant to be empowering – to take action and responsibility, to take the reins and be in charge of your own life. But, too often, it gets interpreted as:

‘Do it yourself. You’re on your own.’

When you’re faced with challenges, when things don’t work, when you’re overwhelmed. When you have too many ideas, or not enough, and can’t see the wood for the trees. When you have lost your mojo, when you are feeling terrible, when you are beating yourself up. When you can’t remember your name, let alone what you’re trying to achieve. When you are racing round like a headless chicken or when you’re stuck.

Don’t ask for help, don’t collaborate, don’t phone a friend. Go figure – it’s up to you.

Yes, it’s up to you to take action – to take your own baby steps and big leaps of faith, to stretch outside your comfort zone, to grow and to be the change you want to see in your world. Self-sufficiency is a wonderful thing, but I prefer resourcefulness.

Being resourceful means you don’t have to do it all yourself. You don’t have to be good at everything. You have full permission to be brilliant at some things and hopeless at others – you choose what you put your energy into. You know who you are and who you are not and you’re ok with that. You are not superwoman or superman – and that’s a good thing. Resourcefulness means you ask for help and you learn from others. You build a superstar support team around you and you work with people who bring out the best in you.

No man or woman is an island. Over the years there have been many occasions where I had to get over myself and ask for help. Each time has proven to be a blessing – not just to me, but also to the person who was helping me. There is something very human and beautiful about admitting that you can’t do everything, about shedding that superhero illusion and being open to asking for, and receiving, help. I truly believe that, as human beings, we’re designed to live in community. That one person’s pet hate truly can be someone else’s joy. And when we step out of the way and let someone else fully step into their light, to do what they can do, what they love to do and what they do best, it’s a blessing all round. When we allow ourselves to need each other, we open up the possibility of drawing the best out of each other.

Where do you need to ask for help?

Challenge your defaults

An article caught my eye recently. The first line asked ‘Are you the default parent?’, followed by ‘If you have to think about it, you’re not. You’d know. Trust me.’ It gave a humorous and somewhat bleak account of all the things you scope, think about and are responsible for if you are the default parent.³

There were definitely parts I nodded furiously and laughed out loud at but I also realised there are times when I’m not the default parent. Like first thing in the morning, for example. If my daughter wakes up before I do (which she often does), Daddy is her go-to person because he’s the morning person and is often awake or ready to wake when she comes in and she has learned that he’s far more likely to respond to her requests for breakfast or to fix the TV than Mummy’s slow and groggy ‘in a minute’, ‘not now’ and ‘go back to bed’ comments.

Equally, I’m not the parent who multitasks in the shower. I blatantly ignore my kids and they’ve learned that they won’t get a sensible response out of Mummy until she’s out of the shower. Kids will go to the person they’re most likely to get a favourable response from. Daddy is the default hot-chocolate maker and sweets dispenser. Daddy is the one who does the funny voices with bedtime stories. But I am the default spider-catcher, the default clothes-drawer sorter, the default ‘make me feel better’ parent and definitely the person responsible for figuring out what’s for tea.

What are you the default go-to person for – at work or at home? Here are some common examples:

The default oracle: the one who knows everything and everyone. The one people come to before they ask Google, Wiki, the intranet or the person who’s actually responsible for answering that question.

The default fixer: the natural problem solver who is the first port of call when stuff hits the fan. The one who gets asked ‘could you take a look at this’ even when it’s completely outside your area.

The default organiser: the one who takes the drinks order when you all rock up at a café and who has probably phoned ahead, booked the table in the corner and checked if there’s soya milk for the dairy-intolerant person. The one everyone else turns to and asks ‘What’s the plan?’.

The default decision maker: the one who gets copied in on emails with ‘What do you think?’ and invited to meetings ‘because we value your opinion’.

The default emergency hero: the one who you can always get hold of at the last minute, who you can rely upon to jump into action at the drop of a hat.

The default counsellor: The first person people turn to when they need a shoulder to cry on or a sounding board to rant at. The one who knows about all the make-ups and break-ups in the office, the hospital visits and whose children are teething.

The default perfecter: one person I worked with recently said that her perfectionism became so well known within her team, that someone she delegated to actually delivered the piece of work to her with the words: ‘it’s not quite there yet but I know you’ll check it through and make it right’.

We choose our defaults, however much it feels the other way: sometimes deliberately because, actually, we quite like being that person (I’m really not that scared of spiders and I do enjoy cooking); sometimes because we made a decision once upon a time, when it made perfect sense, and haven’t questioned it since. And others, well we just kind of fell into the habit.

It’s good to revisit our defaults from time to time and to ask how well they’re working for us. For example, while my husband is a full-time Master’s student and I’m the one bringing home the bacon, should I be the default one to cook it too? The truth is I enjoy cooking so, unless I physically can’t be there to do it, I tend to assume the responsibility. But if I’m starting to resent that, I need to be the one to change it.

How do you stop being the default person – if you choose to?

1. Make yourself less available. People will always default to the quickest or easiest route, so making it harder to find it from you can make all the other options far more attractive. Delay responding, be less accommodating, say no from time to time. Point them in the right direction, even if it takes just as much time as giving them the answer or doing it for them. Give them an incentive to go and find the answer by a different means.
   
2. Hand over the responsibility. I have a horrible habit of being indecisive and, sometimes, I’m guilty of asking others for their opinion, just to check and, essentially, to make my decision for me. Chief Ninja, Graham has pulled me up on this before and asked, ‘Why did you need to check with me?’ At other times, he has turned around and told me, ‘You decide. I trust you.’ Yes, in the same amount of time he could have made the decision for me, but this way he’s training me to let go of using him as my crutch and get used to making my own decisions.
   
3. Accept it takes time to learn. My husband is a great cook, but he hasn’t been the one to make sure dinner is on the table day in, day out for the last 12 years. So of course it’s going to take him time to learn, to get used to it. And he probably won’t do it the same way I did. He will need to figure out his own way of doing things and I need to let him. That’s my learning curve, too. In fact, when I did finally hand over the reins in the kitchen, his words were, ‘I’ll do it, as long as you leave me to it!’ No feedback or help, no ‘let me just show you’. That told me!
   
4. Let it go. As well as letting go of control, I also need to let go of being the default person. There’s a part of me that likes being the default person, to be wanted and in demand. Honestly, that’s probably the hardest part to let go of – my ego. I distinctly remember sitting upstairs one day, working on this book while my husband was cooking one of my signature stir-fry dishes for tea, realising I could choose to feel redundant or free to write – and it was scary how tempting it was to choose to be needed.
   

   ‘Step away from the kitchen and enjoy every moment!’ a Facebook friend reminded me.

What defaults do you need to step away from, so you can enjoy what you do more fully?

The art of juggling

A while ago I took a crash course in juggling. I had somehow been roped in to helping out with some children’s work, and learning circus skills was one of the things I had to do. Interestingly, I was incredibly bad at juggling actual balls and spinning real plates! But one thing I noticed was this: even when you’re juggling, you don’t do everything at once.

You move one ball at a time. You get one up in the air before you move on to the next one. You release a ball before you catch another one. Successful jugglers don’t throw all their balls in the air and hope to catch them all (even if some of them look like they’re doing that for effect). The same goes for juggling life. If I try and pay attention to everything all at once, it’s chaos. When I get one thing in motion first, I can then let it go and move on to the next thing. I can have different plates spinning, but only if I get them going one at a time. It’s like cooking a roast dinner: you don’t cook the chicken to perfection, then start peeling the potatoes, but equally you don’t try and baste the chicken and peel the potatoes at the same time. You’re cooking several things in tandem, but paying attention to each thing in turn.

Juggling takes practice. When you first start it’s hard enough to juggle two items, but as you become more practised and the movement becomes familiar to your muscles, you find that certain moves become habit and you’re able to take on more adventurous challenges. The things you’re familiar with require less mental investment, and once you crack the basics, there’s room to progress with less frustration.
There are certain things you can probably juggle in your sleep because you’re so used to doing them, but new horizons and unfamiliar situations take time, attention and energy to get used to. A new job, becoming a parent, entering a new season in life or stepping into new territory all come with a learning curve. Every move needs attention. Every step we take, we’re learning. And the chances are we’ll get it wrong plenty of times before we get it right. As I learned in my early days of parenting, even when we do get it right another change can change what right looks like. And that’s ok: life is something we make up as we go along.

Trying and failing is how you learn. A friend of mine, who runs workshops that combine circus skills with neurology, tells me that trying and failing sends a signal to our brain that it needs to create a new pathway. It’s through the process of trying and failing that we become able to do things that we previously couldn’t do. He also tells me that daily practice becomes much easier when you leave juggling balls lying around. If there’s something you are finding hard to get off the ground right now, what would make it easier to pick up? Making it more visible or more bite size perhaps? Putting a baby step on your to-do list, lowering the stakes or leaving the file out to tinker with?

You never completely switch off from everything else. You’re always aware of what’s in the air – what could drop if another variable is introduced or someone throws you a curveball – and what, invariably, you need to come back to in order to keep in motion. There’s an amount of work devoted to keeping everything going. The act of juggling itself takes effort and I guess that’s the trade-off. For those of us who find ourselves playing in multiple arenas, we need to devote part of ourselves to the art and act of juggling itself. But we need to make sure that juggling is not all we do. What we juggle has to be meaningful – otherwise we run the risk of just going through the motions, exhausting ourselves just to keep all the balls in the air.

You keep moving. My son asked me a brilliant question one day, as we watched my husband park his motorbike in the garage: ‘How do you stay balanced?’. The answer I realised was: you keep moving. You can’t really balance on a bike standing still. And that’s the thing: life isn’t static. It isn’t a sequence of scientific, carefully measured, uniform steps. It’s expressive, passionate and full of movement – like a dance, where there’s rhythm and variety.
I’m told that once you get into a rhythm, the process of juggling is actually really relaxing! Juggling can even be used as a therapy to relieve stress and anxiety and promote well-being as well as brain function. Once we find our groove and establish a rhythm, we become excited to learn new tricks and try different combinations. We become adventurous and experiment with what and how we juggle because we have a steady rhythm to come back to.

There’s a limit to how many balls you can physically hold in your hand. Don’t be afraid to drop a few balls (or your standards) from time to time – especially if you are picking up new ones. As much as it looks spectacular when we see circus performers juggling a great array of wonderful things, there’s also a beauty in simplicity and variety. Rollercoasters can be breathtaking and brilliant fun, but they lose their appeal if we are on them all the time. I won’t deny there’s something exhilarating about getting to the end of a whirlwind week, I imagine not unlike the adrenaline rush of an extreme sport. There’s something incredibly life affirming about living full on and realising that we’re capable of far more than we thought initially. But when exhilaration becomes exhaustion, when anticipation becomes dread, when energising becomes draining and wonderment becomes utter confusion, that’s when I know it’s time to change something – to strip back and simplify, to take life at a slower pace, to reclaim and redefine what it means to live life to the full.

At the risk of bringing another metaphor into the picture, I recently read in Digging for Diamonds by Cathy Madavan that diamonds shine brilliantly because they have multiple facets. If a diamond is cut with too many facets, it dulls and loses its fire. But with the right combination multiple facets create brilliance by slowing down the light. Yet how often do we see multiple roles as a sign that we have to speed up because we have so much to do? Juggling is exhausting when we feel we have to fulfil all our roles at the same rate, pace, depth and breadth, as if it was the only thing we do. When we allow ourselves to slow down to a pace that works for us, juggling can be a beautiful thing.

When we’re juggling well, everything is separate and interlinked. One thing leads to another. When the different facets of our lives work well together, the light bounces around and lights us up brilliantly. Just as the juices from a roast chicken and the cooking water from the vegetables can come together to make a delicious gravy, when the different roles in our lives complement rather than compete with each other, there’s a sense of cohesion and flow that makes life both easier and richer.

Over to you