Professional plate spinning
One of my best skills is probably “professional plate spinning.” You won’t find it on my LinkedIn or my resume, I doubt it’s even in the skills drop-down. But it’s real, and I think it can be taught.
I’m not talking about the circus trick, ceramic plates on sticks, kept spinning before they wobble and smash. I’m talking about the ability to work on many projects at once, to keep taking on more, and to give honest updates and timelines across all of them without dropping the ball. People started telling me years ago that I was good at it. Enough of them have now said it that I’ve stopped arguing.
Start with opportunity cost
There’s a concept we’re taught growing up that I teach to my teams: opportunity cost. When someone asks you to do something, know your capacity. Don’t be afraid to say, “Sure, which of my other priorities would you like me to push back?”
That reframes the whole conversation. When work gets delegated, there are a few honest responses. “Yep, you got it” is confident but a little naive, it implies the task is trivial. “Yep, when do you need it by?” is better, because it opens a negotiation on dates. And “no” is a bold move that, handled well, protects your capacity and shows strength.
The method: turn everything into plates
Here’s the practical part. Write down every single task you have outstanding, a spreadsheet is ideal. Use extra columns to group them: by area (“security,” “engineering”) or by type (“1:1,” “deep work”). Estimate each one the way you’d size work in agile, but in time rather than points. If anything has a hard due date, put it in its own column.
Terry Pratchett had a wonderful line, in Truckers, about dealing with an impossible task: you break it down into a number of very difficult tasks, and break each of those into horribly hard ones, and those into tricky jobs, and so on. He wrote it in 1989, and it’s essentially agile before agile had a name. Apply it to your list: anything longer than about 90 minutes gets broken into smaller tasks. Iterate until every row is a single, spinnable plate, ideally with its acceptance criteria sitting in a column right beside it.
Spin them in the right order
Now do something with all that data. Start with the plates that have due dates and get them onto your calendar, with enough room to deliver ahead of time, so you’ve got buffer for when they run long or an interrupt lands. The tasks without due dates can be done whenever; rank them top to bottom. Then look at your calendar: got an hour’s gap today? Find a one-hour task and fill it. Make the recurring stuff, email, reviews, into recurring calendar events, so you genuinely have time set aside for them.
It doesn’t matter if you only have a little available time that week. If you fill the time you do have with the right tasks and re-prioritise often, the work gets done.
Plan for the interrupt
Even if you plan and replan daily, an interrupt will come, a new top priority, or a meeting that eats your task time. So replan. Decide whether you can make that meeting, decide whether the task can move, make the call, and explain it: “I can’t make that, I need to finish this report for Bob.” A decision with a reason is almost always respected.
The trick: pre-spin your plates
What if you’re on target, nothing’s due, and you have a big gap? Get ahead. Deliver early, though use judgement about when to actually share it. Better still, spend that time on problems you don’t have yet: researching a compliance framework you might pursue, sketching what happens to the org if a key person leaves, preparing the thing someone will inevitably ask for.
Do this consistently and the requests stop being interrupts. They become a matter of pulling something from your repository, updating it, and sharing. From the outside it looks like you’re spinning an impossible number of plates. Really, you’re just using your quiet time well and keeping plates pre-spun.
When it all feels like too much
I picked this up in therapy, and it transfers straight to work. When you’re overwhelmed, shrink your horizon. Plan only the next hour, just what you’re doing for the next sixty minutes, nothing further. Still drowning? Plan in shorter increments. As you regain control, plan further out: a full day in one-hour blocks, then a few days, then a week. Control comes back in proportion to how far ahead you let yourself look.
It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine
Plate spinning isn’t better than other ways of working, it’s different. Some people do their best work focused on one or two things, and they’re excellent at it. But the people I’ve seen take on a seemingly impossible amount of work and stay calm tend to thrive in leadership, especially at startups. It’s a learnable skill; not everyone will flourish at it, and none of this should be followed verbatim. Just because it works for me doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.
Sometimes, to know where we’re going, we have to look back at where we’ve been.
My own riff on Maya Angelou