234: The Multitasking Mind
Can you really multitask, or are you just rapidly switching between contexts and hoping your brain doesn't lose track? This week, we dig into the cognitive load of deep work, the impossibility of maintaining multiple large projects in your head simultaneously, and the ADHD patterns that shape how many of us think and work.
Carol returns from the chaos of federal government planning meetings with renewed energy and alignment. Adam finds flow in his Jump Run project while navigating compliance season. Ben discovers the exhausting reality of writing actual specification documents for the first time in his career—and realizes just how taxing deep thinking can be.
reCAPTCHA Migration: https://privatecaptcha.com/blog/recaptcha-migration-to-google-cloud-2025/
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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Highlight
[00:00:00] Ben: I always refer to myself as a very high functioning, low functioning person. In, in that, there's very little that I do in this world that rises to any, degree of
[00:00:11] Adam: Right. We know it's, it's a cold fusion white space
[00:00:15] Ben: But I mean,
[00:00:15] Adam: karate chopping your cowboy horse.
[00:00:39] Intro
[00:00:39] Adam: okay, here we go. And on today's show we're gonna talk about multitasking and if it's even a thing that you could do, like, I don't, I'm not sure it exists, but anyway, we'll get into that in a minute. but first, as usual, we'll start with our try and fails Carol's back.
[00:00:51] Adam: Welcome back Carol.
[00:00:52] Carol's Triumph
[00:00:52] Carol: Hey, thank you guys. Yeah, I've been a little crazy at work, but definitely back. So
[00:00:57] Adam: vacation in Portugal, so
[00:01:00] Carol: he is vicious slacker, but having fun.so I think I'm gonna kick us off with a big joint triumph. Like you guys have heard me talk about work since, well, January and how crazy it's kind of been. And when I was asked to describe my current work environment yesterday, the only word I have was chaos. And I don't know that everyone fully appreciated that answer, but it was my honest answer.
[00:01:23] Carol: It just feels like a lot of chaos. So my big win is that for the past two days I've been in like face-to-face meetings with leadership, going through planning and what we're capable of doing over the next three to six months. Even looking at like a year, like how we negotiate resources, like how do we staff better, like kind of just looking at what our team can do and what we're capable of.
[00:01:47] Carol: So the reason why that feels like such a big win for me is because of the uncertainty and everything that's been going on with federal hiring. So you've had hiring freezes, you've had rifs, you've had layoffs, you've had people walk out. Like there's just been a lot of unknowns that we couldn't have predicted was gonna be a thing, you know, last year. So to, be back in a room and to be having these real conversations, and to feel like everything is starting to matter again and that I have a voice in where we're going and some direction, it just, sometimes alignment is just progress, right? Like, just getting people on the same page with what we're gonna do is just a big, big win.
[00:02:30] Carol: So after two full days of it, I just feel super motivated and energized and kind of refocused on what our goals are and how we achieve them. But I will say also after two days, I was begging to go look at code or error log or PRS because I was humans out. So,
[00:02:48] Ben: Yo. I feel that getting human out that is real.
[00:02:52] Carol: yeah. There was a lot of, so what do you think Carol?
[00:02:54] Carol: And I was like, I want you to stop asking me what I think. 'cause I just wanna sit here silently and like not speak for a minute. So, but it was just, it was overall very good.
[00:03:03] Ben: I also think that there's a real cycling that your brain has to do in sort of deep thinking and then shallow thinking, and then deep thinking if you go into that deep thinking mode. And I think if you try to stay in that deep thinking mode for too long, it's, it's very, very taxing at, at least for me, I get to the end of a day where I'm working on something very continuously and I just, I feel dead by the end of the day.
[00:03:27] Carol: I mean, that's where I've been with Steve at home. I'm just like, I have to turn off. I'm so sorry. Like there is no more mental capacity for anything right now. So luckily he understands.
[00:03:36] Ben: I remember at the beginning of COVID, or I guess not at the beginning of COVID, but once we're sort of into COVID, John Oliver, who does a late night show called Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. They, he would always say things like, ah, I can't believe it's, March 249th. And it was like, you know, just kind of we're in this one giant month going into COVID for a year.
[00:03:56] Ben: And, and this year has definitely felt, I think like that for a lot of people.
[00:04:00] Carol: Yeah, definitely. I looked at the calendar today and I was like, as long as it feels like it's been, I also can't believe it's already October and we're halfway through October. You know, I'm just like, I turned around and my summer ended. So anyways, but that's me. And what about you, Adam?
[00:04:16] Adam's Triumph
[00:04:16] Adam: I'm gonna double dip a little bit here. you know, I actually, no, it's all, it's all positive. It's all triumph. I was gonna say, it's a little triumph, a little, little fail, but, just, you know, all positive. It's, I've had a very productive week, both at work and, on my side project jump on, which I mentioned from time to time here on the show.
[00:04:32] Adam: I I did not spend really any time over the summer working on jump run 'cause I was jumping every weekend. and you know, we just got lucky with a lot of good weather and working all day. And I, I, after a full day of work, I'm no longer the person that finishes a day of work and then goes home and spends another six hours working on personal code stuff.
[00:04:54] Adam: I now, I'm the guy that like, needs to sit and watch tv, otherwise I just feel exhausted and I still feel exhausted. That's called getting old. But, um, anyway, so I, I didn't really work on jump run at all over the summer. and now that summer stuff is cooling off, and weather's not as good anymore.
[00:05:13] Adam: We've had some, some off weekends and stuff. I've had some time to spend thinking about and working on jump run stuff and kind of got past a place that I was mentally stuck on. I figured out like how to implement a feature that. Is we, we, maybe we can get into it a little bit in the after show, but basically just, something I was stuck on and, and, you know, I was like, I had an aha moment.
[00:05:32] Adam: Just real simple implementation to get past it, which was nice. And then the other thing, is surprise, surprise, it's time to get back into compliance again. yeah, we're, we're mid-October now as we're recording this. And, so, you know, here we go. We're in Q4 and it's time to start getting our ducks in a row for, for compliance.
[00:05:51] Adam: I did have my kickoff meeting with, the, the auditing company that we're using. Same one we've been using and have been happy with. And from that meeting sounds like everything is gonna be hunky dory, even better than last year. Like they've kind of streamlined and improved their processes some, and so I'm looking as much as you can.
[00:06:08] Adam: I'm looking forward to a, a good year, of compliance stuff, so, mm-hmm.
[00:06:12] Carol: I don't know why, whenever like you talk about it or anyone else talks about, oh, I'm going into the compliance round, like, oh, I have all this paperwork to do and stuff. And I think of like, when I think of roles, I think of like switching hats. You know, it's like putting on the different kind of hat. When I think of compliance, I think of like big, like comfy socks and in a corner with my bathrobe trying to like make it through the day.
[00:06:34] Carol: I don't think of like some nice pat change. I think of misery and
[00:06:38] Adam: that's funny. Well, yeah, you know, your, your, where your brain went was, how do I make myself comfortable enough to get through this? My brain was like, okay, instead of changing hats, it's like a cartoony, like a, a big metal ring around your neck that's got a chain going down to the floor
[00:06:51] Carol: Oh no.
[00:06:51] Adam: a cannon ball or bowling ball laying on the floor that you have to drag around and chain to it. So,
[00:06:57] Ben: Sounds like fun.
[00:06:59] Adam: you know, other duties as assigned.
[00:07:02] Ben's Triumph
[00:07:02] Adam: So, yeah, that's what I got going on. What do you got going on, Ben?
[00:07:04] Ben: I'm gonna go with a little bit of a triumph. I had something I wanted to talk about, but I think this will be more part of the main show. But, this week at work, I have been working on a specification document for a set of user interfaces in our application. And, this is unchartered territory for me, meaning I've never sat down and actually written out what an application is supposed to do ahead of time.
[00:07:29] Ben: I mean, for the, you know, on a generous day I'll open up a Jira ticket and put a one line sentence about a screen that I wanna build. but I'm actually sitting down and I have like 12 or 13 screens within the application that I'm trying to think through. And I'm, and my manager wants me to identify like what data's gonna be on the screen, what are the calls to action, what are the user stories associated with that screen?
[00:07:56] Ben: And it's been a really interesting exercise going back to what Carol was saying about just that, that being around people and talking and deep thinking, like, I get to the end of my day now and I'm just like, Ugh, I don't wanna think about anything else.but it's fun because I definitely find myself hitting.
[00:08:15] Ben: Walls that I know I would have hit during the development process where I need to say, you know, what actually is this part of the application I'm trying to build? What, what is the actual data here? How does the data influence the runtime behavior of the application? And there is something satisfying about being able to answer those in the document before I've actually started to write any code.
[00:08:37] Ben: e everyone on the team is fairly dead set against a waterfall methodology, but I think everyone is also kind of a, like enough design upfront mentality where we have to do something so that at least we're all on the same page before we start the development. So I'm, it's an exhausting process, but it's been kind of a nice new experience for me having to actually document what I'm gonna do instead of just, you know, putting on my cowboy hat and karate chopping it to mix metaphors.
[00:09:10] Ben: That's, that's what cowboys are known for.
[00:09:13] Carol: Karate shopping, do you have a tool you're using to do this?
[00:09:17] Ben: yeah, actually, and that's another thing I wanna talk about. So, I mean, just right now I'm, I was doing some light sketching of UIs inside of the whiteboard that comes with Zoom, which is no different than I think any of the other digital whiteboards. But now that I'm actually getting to the writing part, I'm using the web-based version of Microsoft Word.
[00:09:38] Ben: I think we're on like Office 360 or whatever the thing is called. And this is just really fascinating because for the last 15 years I've been using Google Docs, and Google, like the whole Google App Suite as my spreadsheet and my words and my PowerPoint presentations. And it is a really interesting juxtaposition of a product like Google Docs, which basically reinvented itself from the ground up versus Microsoft Word, which not only has, you know, decades of prior art in terms of word.
[00:10:12] Ben: To live up to, but apparently they also can now sync between the desktop version of Word and the web-based version of Word. And I will tell you that the web-based version of Word is junky Monkey. It's like weirdly bad, weirdly bad.
[00:10:28] Carol: I can't use it.
[00:10:29] Ben: I, I'm, I'm literally refreshing my page and just losing formatting and, and I'm googling for answers.
[00:10:37] Ben: I'm going to chat GPT and chat. Chat GT is like, oh yeah, that's, that's a known problem. And with a web-based version of Word, they're like, all you have to do to fix that is open up the document in the desktop version, save it, allow it to resync back up to, to Microsoft Drive, and then basically use the web for light editing or perhaps viewing only. Like what? Just, I mean, considering the fact that Microsoft has been building Word for a million years, they dominated the browser market for years. The fact that this version of Ms. Word is so bad is like unsettling or it, like, it reframes my entire perspective on how companies can apply resources. I don't know.
[00:11:23] Ben: It's fascinating.
[00:11:24] Adam: I don't think that they have really ever dominated anything that was web based though. Like they had Hotmail, but that was a purchase I think. like and, and Internet Explorer. Yeah. They had a kind of monopolistic advantage and were able to become the most used browser. But that wasn't web code. I'm trying to think if there was anything.
[00:11:43] Ben: It, it's fascinating.
[00:11:45] Adam: I mean, outlook, web access is, I guess, got a good reputation.
[00:11:49] Ben: it's so bad. It's not that it's so bad. I mean, like, I guess it does what it needs to do. It's one of these things where being I think more steeped in a industry, you know, envision was a very design oriented company and it was a design oriented industry. You come in or I come in to look at the, outlook online and it just feels like no one who's ever worried about a product looking good has worked on any of these teams.
[00:12:18] Ben: And I'm not a designer, you know, I don't think I could sit down and do a better job, but I know that there are people who can do a better job and if you just paid them, they would happily help you. It just, it feels, it feels like that is just not a priority at all.
[00:12:32] Adam: Well, I mean, going back to the same points that you used earlier, you know, so they've got what, somewhere between 20 and 30 years of building this native app and like bringing it basically to perfection. Then all of a sudden, you know, some pointy haired boss goes, okay, now make it work on the web.
[00:12:49] Adam: You've got a year and a half.
[00:12:51] Ben: Right.
[00:12:52] Adam: and it's gotta look exactly like word in the, in the native editor. And oh, also, we're not gonna stop developing new features for the native word while you're working. So,go.
[00:13:04] Ben: It's a classic problem.
[00:13:05] Adam: So,
[00:13:06] Carol: Yeah, I, I run almost all of the office suite as the desktop version. Other than Outlook. I do use Outlook in the browser, but that's it. Everything else is, I just use the, the desktop version.
[00:13:17] Ben: Yeah, I think maybe that's what I'll have to start doing. Just 'cause it's, it's like I'm constantly refreshing the page just to see if the thing I just formatted is gonna keep its formatting.
[00:13:29] Adam: Libre office for life. Yo.
[00:13:30] Ben: You know, it literally says, I mean, I don't know if chat, you know, who knows if chat GPT just makes up some of this stuff, but the first real issue that I ran into was that, a, a single indentation for bulleted lists.
[00:13:41] Ben: Totally fine. Second indentation. Refresh. Totally fine. Refresh again. Totally fine. Refresh a third time. Oh yeah. All of that formatting is now gone and chat. GPT is like, oh yeah, that's just, that's a known issue because the like the XML formatting definitions have to be synced back and forth between the web and the non-web, and it's just, just bonkers anyway,
[00:14:05] Adam: I feel bad for the engineers that have to try and make it work. Like that's, they, they go into work every day and they're like, my best case scenario for today is I fix one bug in the bulleted list in, you know, word for the web.
[00:14:18] Carol: and that'll break the normal bullet that's currently working.
[00:14:22] Adam: Yeah.
[00:14:23] Ben: Oh man. I mean, yeah, I don't envy it for sure. It's easy to judge when you're not the one building it.
[00:14:29] Google ReCAPTCHA Migration
[00:14:29] Adam: Alright, so, let's move on to some news. we don't usually do topical news, timely stuff, but hey, in case you catch this, as it is, originally published, it's middle of October. It's October 16th, as we record this, and I just learned today because it came up in a newsletter that I get, that, Google's recapture service is moving into Google Cloud and they're being more transparent about pricing stuff.
[00:14:52] Adam: and basically you have till the end of calendar 2025 to get migrated over. I mean, there's more details. We'll have a link in the show notes that kind of goes into it. but, you know, like PSA, if you're a, a regular user of, recapture, you might want to start thinking about, your schedule for the rest of the year.
[00:15:09] Adam: It shouldn't be that big of a deal to migrate it, but, you know, there's only a couple months.
[00:15:13] Carol: Recap has been like free, right? Like it's been
[00:15:16] Adam: yeah, the pricing up until now has been, I believe, like you get. If I'm not mistaken, 10,000, checks or whatever they call 'em, requests a, a month. And then after that it's like, call us.and they've been a little bit more transparent about pricing going forward.
[00:15:32] Adam: I think what I saw is they're still gonna have the 10,000 requests for, for free per month. and then if you want to go up to like the, the official pro, whatever they're calling it, tier, you can pay $8 a month after that and you get up to a hundred thousand a month, I believe. And then after that it, you have to go like to the enterprise level and then you still pay the $8 for a hundred thousand and then for every thousand after that, I think it's a dollar. So
[00:15:58] Carol: Yeah.
[00:15:59] Adam: yeah. So if you're a heavy, heavy recapture user, maybe you're gonna use these two months to look into alternatives.
[00:16:05] Carol: Yeah.
[00:16:06] Adam: I don't wanna do it. I, there's a, there's a thing that I wanna say, but I'm trying to avoid saying it.
[00:16:10] Adam: in, in the current age of AI stuff. capcha apparently is a, is a solved problem, right? They've got like capture, you can, you can buy Capcha Solves, online for super cheap and you just integrate with the service and it takes a, a second or whatever, and it just solves whatever captures you get.
[00:16:26] Adam: So,
[00:16:26] Ben: bonkers.
[00:16:28] Adam: uh, told Ben he wasn't allowed to say the word ai, this whole episode.
[00:16:33] Adam: And now we're putting it back in the drawer.
[00:16:35] Ben: I'll, I'll, I'll bring it back to Google for a second because, I don't, like a year or two ago, maybe three years, my sense of time is completely corrupt at this point. Google, I, I use Google app. I use Gmail, but it's like branded Gmail, you know? And years ago, Google starts sending out emails to everybody saying, oh, this is no longer gonna be a free service.
[00:16:55] Ben: You're gonna have to start paying like $5 a month per user and you need to update your billing by a certain period. And I never did anything.
[00:17:03] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:04] Ben: like, I don't know if I'm just still on a free tier somehow, or maybe I don't have because it's just me. Maybe there's like a threshold to users, but like, I still don't pay for Google apps and I don't know if
[00:17:16] Adam: Yeah,
[00:17:17] Ben: to be.
[00:17:18] Adam: I'm right there with you. I was, I got those emails and I immediately like, panicked. I was like, okay, well, I gotta download all my Google photos on that account and, and everything, and, and move it over elsewhere. I spent a lot of time and a lot of energy dealing with that, and never did like completely shut down that email address, and I haven't been charged for it, so I'm not gonna complain.
[00:17:38] Carol: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:38] Ben: I, it must be either I'm grandfathered in because I think I've been using that for like 15 years or something. Or it was just a threshold.
[00:17:46] Adam: yeah, I think if anything it's like, oh, you're a single user account. No big deal. Whatever. But, and also it also grandfathered, like you can't o you cannot open a new free Google Apps account now.
[00:17:58] Carol: No. Which is one reason why I won't get rid of my old account because it's linked to it and I'm like, ah, I can't update. It's like my new married one because I lose a lot of things. So I just maintain two Google accounts.
[00:18:11] Adam: yeah. I have like nine Google accounts. It's stupid.
[00:18:15] Ben: It, it, it's so interesting to me, and this is just, you know, the world that you live in versus the world that other people live in, where for the longest time the idea of opening a Gmail account or whatever, kind of an email account and just using a white label domain, you know, basically having their stuff, but on your domain, you know, at ben nadel.com or whatever.
[00:18:36] Ben: And then I'll be walking around town, I see flyers up or people advertising businesses, and they're like, oh, come check out my art gallery at Susan's art gallery@yahoo.com. I'm like, bro, it's like literally free to just get a domain and set up an email.
[00:18:51] Adam: before we got on here, I was just reading an article, about John Bolton being indicted that he was a national security advisor, right?
[00:18:59] Ben: said John Bolton. I thought Michael
[00:19:01] Adam: Oh
[00:19:01] Ben: I'm like, what?
[00:19:02] Carol: The
[00:19:03] Adam: no, no. John Bolton, the, the, I dunno if he can, is considered politician, whatever. He was a, a, an aide to a couple presidents in including Trump.
[00:19:12] Adam: but.the article was talking about these things that the, the allegations that, you know, he's being indicted for, and one of them was that he was sending information that he clearly knew was,classified via his AOL email account,
[00:19:32] Carol: He was sending it to my grandpa, you know, like who else has AOL think my dad does.
[00:19:38] Adam: Yeah. I, I, hmm, I have no words.
[00:19:42] Carol: Mm.
[00:19:43] Ben: Good.
[00:19:44] Adam: Okay, cool. So if you're, if you're a recapture user, get on it. You don't have, yeah. Eliminate. So I'll also mention too, before we move off this topic, apparently there is like an auto migrate thing. Like if you're just doing it to like, leave comments on your blog and you get like nine comments a month or whatever, you're probably fine because there's a, if you do nothing, they'll auto migrate you.
[00:20:03] Adam: They're gonna create a, an account for you in Google Cloud platform, GCP.with like empty billing information. And so if for whatever reason your usage ever goes up to the point where you're no longer qualified for the free tier, then you're gonna start getting errors because you're not paying for the extra usage.
[00:20:21] Adam: But other than that, it should be so good luck. Godspeed.
[00:20:26] Ruby Gem Kerfuffle
[00:20:26] Ben: In in other news related stuff, and I can't really speak to this at all because I just heard about it and I don't know anything, but I heard on two different podcasts there was some kerfuffle in the Ruby world. Where they have, so in the node world, we have NPM, which is our, our package repository, and they have an equivalent in the ruby gems world, like the, the place that manages all the gems.
[00:20:50] Ben: And there was some sort of like hostile takeover
[00:20:54] Adam: Oh,
[00:20:55] Ben: of, of the company that manages it. I, I don't, I can't speak to it other than just like little snippets that I heard, but, but like someone took over the, the GitHub account that manages it and like kicked everybody else off or something?
[00:21:09] Adam: So when you say hostile takeover, are we talking about more like buying 51% of the stock and now haha, on the company screw you? Or is this more like hacked?
[00:21:17] Ben: no. No. It's not a hack. I think it's more the, the former, I think it has something to do with, like Shopify is basically the one client that keeps that. That package manager alive financially. And they need, there was something about they need to get it to be more compliant with regulations and standards and security practices.
[00:21:38] Ben: And I, I don't know, but apparently it has ruffled a lot of feathers and that's, that's as much as I know.
[00:21:43] Carol: Interesting.
[00:21:43] Adam: Sounds terrifying. If I was a regular Ruby developer, that would be a big deal.
[00:21:48] Ben: Yeah, it, it's fascinating. 'cause I'm, I, I think most of us here are old enough to remember that node zero point 10 was forked to become Node was like io
[00:22:00] Adam: No, do was it? No. IO or io js?
[00:22:03] Ben: it was io I think
[00:22:04] Adam: No, io. Yeah.
[00:22:05] Ben: and that caused a huge kerfuffle and then it ended up getting merged back in and it kind of pushed the whole industry forward.
[00:22:11] Ben: You know, some, I don't know, maybe something like that'll, I, I, I know very little about the Ruby community.
[00:22:17] Adam: Yeah.
[00:22:17] Multitasking
[00:22:17] Adam: Well, you know, while you guys have been talking about this, I've been kind of background thread, processing on our main topic for the day,
[00:22:25] Carol: Wait, what was it again?
[00:22:27] Adam: multitasking.
[00:22:28] Carol: Yes, that's right.
[00:22:29] Adam: so, you know, like I said at the top, I am not a multitasker. I'm not even sure that anybody actually truly does multitask. I think maybe just some people are better at, have better memories and are better at context switching than me.
[00:22:41] Carol: I have lots of post-it notes for a reason.
[00:22:44] Ben: And I would go so far. So when I think about this, this has been top of mind for me for a couple of reasons. One is I just recently got back from CF Summit, which is Cold Fusion Summit out, conference out in Vegas. We talked about this in one of the previous episodes. And, you know, I go and I take my photos with people and I come home and I have to edit those photos.
[00:23:02] Ben: And it's, and it's so tedious and, I, I mean, I enjoy it, but it's super tedious and I wish I was better at it. And it just takes up all of my mind space until it's done, because it feels so daunting. And then when I'm doing that, I'm not writing, I'm not researching anything else. And then I've talked previously about how I've been working on my big sexy poems app.
[00:23:22] Ben: And that in and of itself put a huge dent in my ability to just do regular r and d and write my blog articles. And I am feeling very much like I'm incapable of having any more than one primary focus in my life. Maybe at best I could say I have one professional focus and one non-professional focus. But beyond that, I mean I am tapped out and I do not have the cognitive or the actual, you know, metaphysical time to dedicate to anything more than that.
[00:23:57] Ben: And I'm just blown away by people who say that they even have more than one hobby. I can't even wrap my head around having more than one hobby.
[00:24:06] Adam: You're a special person, Ben. I, I mean, as somebody that has a ton of hobbies, yeah, I, I guess that that's a thing, but I never do all of them. Or even more than one of them at once though, you know?
[00:24:18] Ben: I
[00:24:19] Carol: What do you mean? You're not like turning bulls while you're jumping outta planes?
[00:24:23] Adam: No, no one at a time.yeah, so I, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, and I really like the idea that, like, so we, you know, when we talk about LLMs, we talk about they can keep stuff in context. and I really like. As a metaphor for multitasking, right? Like, I have all this information about the thing that I'm working on and the, the, the bigger the, the project and the more complicated it is, the more context that I have to have in my head.
[00:24:52] Adam: and so being, having two large sets of context is definitely a no-go for me, right? There are times I will say like, I've, I'm in the middle of a week's long project or whatever, and then I just, I get to a po a point where I'm like, I, I can't think about this anymore. I need a break and I'll go do something that I know I can knock out in an hour.
[00:25:13] Adam: Because it doesn't require me to truly like unload everything from my brain. I just am kind of like putting it on pause, letting the brain rest a little bit because this other thing is not gonna take a lot of brain power. and so I guess in that way, like you could consider that multitasking 'cause I paused one task and did another one and then come back to the big one.
[00:25:31] Adam: But sure.
[00:25:32] Ben: I always think of those as palate cleansers, that there's stuff that are just low thinking, getting the blood pumping, you know, little muscle memory in action. You let the brain rest while the body does the work kind of a thing. I, I, I definitely love that kind of stuff, but. It's, it's definitely, it has to be, at least for me, a break from the deep thinking aspect.
[00:25:53] Carol: Yeah, no, I'm kind of like torn if I'm digging through bugs or like error logs, I feel like I do a very good job of finding the problem, but I need to immediately hand that off to someone else to solve so I can keep digging for more problems. So I can be like, okay, here's issue A, you go fix a, I'm gonna keep looking to find the real root of like this whole thing, like, I can't stop, because if I do, I'll never get to the root.
[00:26:17] Carol: Like I'll just keep digging through the one. But in the process of like bug hunting last week, I realized like we have a memory leak going on. So while solving the memory leak late last week, early this week, every single time someone would ask me something, I would have to like stop my debugger, stop my memory analysis.
[00:26:38] Carol: And when I would go back it was starting over at at square, like one, like starting 0.1 all over again going, where did I even get to? No notes help me. Like no amount of like adding comments to the code to be like, okay, come back right here. 'cause this is where I think we're not disposing of this context didn't matter.
[00:26:56] Carol: I had to start over every time and go back, okay, snapshot one, snapshot two, let's compare to three. And yeah, I definitely could not switch context when it's heavily involved and super like hard. It's not possible like that. Deep thinking. It doesn't, it doesn't allow for it in my head. Maybe it's 'cause I'm old now though.
[00:27:16] Carol: Maybe that's the problem.
[00:27:18] Deep Thinking and Background Processing
[00:27:18] Ben: I don't know, because I think we, we talked about this a little bit in the pre-show, that so much of deep thinking is then also the stuff that happens in the background when you're doing other stuff, whether, you know, you're showering or walking the dog or doing grocery shopping. And this again plays into this notion that I just don't have the time to think about more than one thing.
[00:27:39] Ben: Because even when I'm not at the desk doing the thing, I'm mulling over it. I'm either proactively or, or subconsciously when I'm not at the desk. And what happens if I'm trying to think deeply about something else at the same time, I, I'm not sure that I'm gonna get that same kind of. Eureka, synergistic value creation, and when I'm just focused on a single thing,
[00:28:04] Adam: Yeah,
[00:28:04] Carol: I agree. Yeah.
[00:28:07] Adam: I, so I mentioned, you know, we've had some bad weather. I wasn't jumping last weekend. and so I, I intentionally was like, okay, well I'm going to, you know, use this as my weekend to catch up around the house, do chores, you know, catch up on little things and to help myself think through like what I don't, I just don't have a list of everything that I've missed.
[00:28:28] Adam: So I took my shower on Saturday morning with no podcast playing, no book, no music, just with the sound of water dropping. and man, I thought of so much stuff in that shower. It was weird. It's like, you know, you, you give yourself that space to become bored and all of a sudden that's where you find your brain works again.
[00:28:49] Carol: Yeah, so I'm trying to detach from my phone a little, trying. I'm making an effort. I used to listen to the news while I would be taking my shower in the morning or taking a bath, I'd turn on a podcast or something. I've tried not doing that. I find myself just rushing to get outta the shower though because I'm bored.
[00:29:05] Carol: I'm like, I can't stand in here any longer. I can't just do the hangout in here and just be peaceful. I need to like have constant simulation. So it's a struggle for me.
[00:29:14] Adam: Yeah. I've learned over the years that this is a very, like a DHD thing. I'm like very dopamine seeking. I've treated it for years, as I talked about early on in the podcast. I've treated it for years with caffeine. Right. You know, I was never on like stimulant medication. I just, I, I stimulated myself with, you know, like darn near a lethal dose of caffeine every day.
[00:29:34] Ben: So, uh,Ish. I find, I sometimes find that, I dunno if this is because I've listened to so many podcasts, like I've trained my body to have that sound going all the time. I mean, not when I'm working, but basically when I'm away from the desk, I just sort of always have something going on in my ear. And to me it's almost like a Rorschach test, meaning that I don't even necessarily have to be listening too closely to the things that people say.
[00:30:03] Ben: I just hear little things, and I use that as, as almost like when you're going to a, an upright citizens brigade, improv theater, and someone's like, oh, you know, shout out three things. And some person's like ice cream and the other person's like coma and the other person's like bus driver, right? And they have to come up with a scene that does all those things.
[00:30:21] Ben: That's kind of a little bit how my brain works when I'm listening to something where someone in a podcast and interview will say one little thing and I almost completely stop listening to the podcast and my brain just goes. In some really weird tangent because of that, and I, I really enjoy that. But what I find now is that when I'm sitting in my silence and I don't have that stream of white noise, it becomes hard for me to just generate random ideas.
[00:30:51] Ben: Like, even if I wanna think about something in particular, I find it very challenging to do. And I don't know if I should be worried about that. Like, that feels on its face very concerning,
[00:31:04] ADHD and External Stimulation
[00:31:04] Carol: I am, I'm laughing. I'm only laughing because this is like me being diagnosed with A DHD, like that is how my brain works. So like you probably probably do a really good job being an engineer because you have a DHD.
[00:31:22] Ben: it's just fascinating. I like having the little, just the little triggers, the little triggers in the conversations. And then when I'm done going down some weird tangent, I pop back into the conversation. I'm listening to what they're saying. Again, I enjoy it. But I find also, I think part of my problem, and, and I think me and Adam talked about this on the last show, when it was just the two of us, that, I think also my inability to visualize things a blocker for me when it comes to deep thinking. Because what I've done my whole life is I will have a thought in my head and that thought will just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and then not like me yelling at myself, you know, like, oh, you look so ugly in that dress.
[00:32:04] Ben: Right. It's more like, it's more like,
[00:32:07] Adam: No, Ben. Ben, look fantastic in that dress.
[00:32:11] Carol: To
[00:32:11] Ben: it's more,
[00:32:12] Carol: heels look good.
[00:32:13] Ben: it's more like if I need to think through a problem that has 10 steps. I will just think about the first step over and over and over and over again. And unless I can get that onto a page or a piece of paper or a drawing, I cannot get my brain to move past it. But there is something about listening to another conversation and doing some thinking at the same time that somehow allows my brain to keep moving.
[00:32:40] Ben: and I, I, I, I dunno, it's just weird. I don't get it, but I sort of lean into it now a little bit.
[00:32:47] Carol: External stimulation.
[00:32:49] Ben: Yeah, it's, it's the same, like if I go for a walk, I find just movement itself can also help me move down a thought path a little bit more effectively. But if I'm just sitting on the couch and thinking, forget about it, there's nothing going on up here that's of any use.
[00:33:05] Carol: Well, like on the a, DD like realm of things, through the meetings, you know, the past two days I've had several like call outs for, do you need to say something because your body language says you need to say something. And I'm going repeatedly, no, I have a DHD. And if I'm not fidgeting, I'm not thinking, you know, if my, if I'm not bouncing, my brain's turned off like, you should be worried.
[00:33:28] Carol: When I stop moving, that means I've like completely, like I'm no longer
[00:33:32] Adam: Checked out. Yeah.
[00:33:33] Carol: Yeah.
[00:33:35] Ben: That's good.
[00:33:37] Running Multiple Businesses
[00:33:37] Ben: I, I listen to people sometimes and they, I've heard people talk about that they run multiple businesses at a, at the same time, that's even more mind blowing than people who have two hobbies. 'cause a hobby at least you can really drop and not think about for a while, but it's not like you can ever be running a business and not be thinking about it.
[00:33:56] Adam: I don't think they're actually actively running both businesses or, you know, multiple businesses at the same time, right? Like, you know, either they don't operate at the same time, right? You've got one business where you're selling tickets outside, you're scalping tickets outside of baseball games, and then you have your nine to five job, right?
[00:34:12] Adam: Like, those are, that's, that's not multitasking. That's just hustling. the,
[00:34:16] Ben: Right.
[00:34:17] Adam: the, and then, you know, you've got the opposite end of the spectrum, which is like, yeah, I own nine businesses. But what I've done is I have hired people who are competent to run those businesses and they work for me, and I don't have to think about it, or I answer eight, I answer questions.
[00:34:31] Adam: They asynchronously or whatever, you know?
[00:34:33] Carol: I have a, I have a coworker who owns, I think the last I heard was like 93 homes that he
[00:34:40] Adam: Holy crap.
[00:34:41] Carol: And not only like, he doesn't have a management company. He buys everything locally, like where he is at manages them himself. The repair requests come to him. He goes like once a month and is like closing on another home that he's then just gonna turn into a rental.
[00:34:56] Carol: Like something floods. He's like, I have to take the day off and go relo this house. I'm like, what? Like how do you, how do you manage that? And, and he's an excellent engineer and it's always on top of everything. I'm like, I don't understand. Like, do you sleep? I mean, I don't know. Yeah.
[00:35:13] Accepting Your Limitations
[00:35:13] Ben: Okay. So I was listening to an interview a little while ago. Can't remember even what podcast or who it was. And this guy was talking about how when he was a kid, he loved math. He really excelled in math, just seemed to enjoy doing it outside of school. Felt like, oh, this is probably something I could do as a career.
[00:35:31] Ben: Went to college and majored in mathematics, did great. Went to, I think, get his master's in. I mean, I'm sure it was more specific than that, but he said when he got to the master's level, he was like, oh, I'm dumb at math. And the other people in this program are like, brilliant, savant math people. and it was a very eye-opening experience for him that there are people who just operate at a totally different level.
[00:35:58] Ben: as much as I hate that, I'm not that kind of a person, like someone who operates at a high level, I do think it's very comforting on some, in some respect to know that that's, that that's what happens in the world. That there are people who are just capable of amazing things for crazy, magical reasons.
[00:36:15] Ben: And, and it's not, it's not even something I can aspire to. And I think to try and aspire to a level like that would only be doing myself a disservice because I would always just be coming up short.and I don't know where I was going with this exactly.
[00:36:29] Adam: you know, that guy goes home and eats Kraft mac and cheese for dinner every night or orders pizza, right? Like, 'cause he can't cook and, and take care of the house or whatever, you know, like.
[00:36:36] Carol: Yeah, just trade offs usually.
[00:36:39] Ben: people who just, they can just operate at a super high level. And so whether it's managing 90 homes or, or, you know, doing some sort of PhD thesis that only four other people in the world can understand, or even I look, so Evan U, who's the guy who created view js and, and vet, he created, the vet compiler.
[00:36:57] Ben: I guess I don't, I don't know so much about this world, but, which basically revolutionized like every package bundler that we have now, apparently. And they just, someone just made a documentary about him and his team, and I'm like, like, that's like, I don't, like, I'll never be able to do that, but I'm okay with that.
[00:37:14] Ben: Like, he's clearly someone who just sees things in a different way and operates on a different level and, and, and I'm okay. I'm okay not living up to that standard.
[00:37:23] Adam: I see stuff like that and I go. I'm sure I had something, some parallel. Obviously I wasn't as big and as, world changing as, you know, v or view or whatever, but I, I made stuff and I just try to remember like I did stuff like that. I'm, I took those big swings when I was in my twenties and my early thirties, and I'm not in my early thirties anymore.
[00:37:42] Adam: You know, I'm in my early forties and my priorities are different, including rest time and, and being away from screens
[00:37:50] Ben: right. You got kids, got houses.
[00:37:52] Adam: yeah, and, and it's just like I'm in a different chapter now. I try to give myself grace for that. It, it would be, that's the thing is like, you know, you see people doing that and it's like, man, that's awesome.
[00:38:03] Adam: I wish I could operate at that level. But really I think in the back of my mind when I'm having those thoughts, I wish I could still do stuff like that. That's front brain thinking and back of brain thinking truly what's going on. Subconsciously there is like, I wish I was that famous. I wish people knew me.
[00:38:18] Adam: Like they knew Evan knew, right? Like, and that's not necessarily a healthy thing to chase, right? Like, so. Just try to be graceful to yourself.
[00:38:27] Carol: Be you.
[00:38:28] Ben: I always refer to myself as a very high functioning, low functioning person. In, in that, I think I'm actually good at very few things. I, I, there's very little that I do in this world that rises to any, degree of
[00:38:44] Adam: Right. We know it's, it's a cold fusion white space
[00:38:48] Ben: But I mean,
[00:38:49] Adam: karate chopping your cowboy horse.
[00:38:53] Ben: you know, like I don't have a lot of hobbies. I don't have a lot of friends. I don't read a lot of books or anything like that. I, like, I, I'm, I'm very narrow in the things that I do and I do some of those things fairly well.
[00:39:03] Ben: and I guess I'm just okay with that. I, I think is, is really my, my meta statement there is I'm just, I've, as I'm getting older, I'm becoming more comfortable with my limitations
[00:39:13] Adam: Yeah.
[00:39:14] Ben: instead of constantly feeling like I have to fight them.
[00:39:17] Adam: Yeah. I was just telling my wife on a, on a dog walk the other night, like, I'm, I'm happy. And it's weird, right? Like I, I, I don't feel the need to like strive and take on more stuff. Right now. I feel like I've got a, I've got plenty of stuff on my plate and I don't, like, I'm not overwhelmed by too much of it at the moment.
[00:39:34] Adam: And, and I don't feel the need to add more, you know? And, and the stuff that I do brings me joy and it's, it's a strange feeling for, I like, this is probably the first time in my life I've felt that way.
[00:39:45] Ben: Nice. That, that sounds awesome.
[00:39:48] Adam: wish I could bottle and sell. Yeah, it only took 43 years.
[00:39:56] Ben: Good times.
[00:39:57] Patreon
[00:39:57] Adam: Okay, well it sounds like we're done talking about multitasking. I don't know. I was, I wasn't paying attention. I was doing nine other things. So, I guess I'll just wrap it up there. So this episode of Working Code is brought to you by a cowboy karate chopping your way through your web dev work.
[00:40:08] Carol: Heck yeah.
[00:40:08] Adam: Unless there's like you, if you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon.
[00:40:15] Adam: Our patrons cover our recording, editing and transcription costs, and we couldn't do this every week without them. Special thanks as always to our top patrons, Monte and Giancarlo. You guys rock.
[00:40:24] Thanks For Listening!
[00:40:24] Adam: We're gonna go do the after show, which you know what it is by now. We're gonna, you know, outro plays. We keep talking patrons.
[00:40:31] Adam: Get to listen. If you want that, you can go to patreon.com/workingcodepod, throw us a few bucks. I think it's as little as well, so it is as little as four bucks a month. But you can pay a year in advance and it's even less than that. I forget what the percentage is, but it's a percentage off. you know, basically for the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you can help us out and get all kinds of early access to new episodes and extra content.
[00:40:55] Adam: You got a whole backlog, 200 plus episodes of after show to go listen to.so that's gonna do it for us this week. We'll catch you next week and until then,
[00:41:03] Carol: Even if you can only handle one task at a time, your heart matters.
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