Parallel Processing
Yesterday I had three things running at the same time.
An op-ed in Glean. A copywriting agent in one Claude window... teaching it our voice, correcting it, feeding it the things we'd written that actually worked. And in another Claude window, I was teaching Claude to think like our brand design studio. Sell sheet logic. What hierarchy means for us. What we want someone to feel when they pick one up.
In another life I'd call that a blur. Now it's just Monday.
Three things. All creative. I didn't lose the thread on any of them.
I've been trying to figure out if I should feel good about it or suspicious of it. Honest answer is both.
For years my gospel was deep work. Single-tasking as discipline. Protect the long uninterrupted block. The distracted mind produces nothing worth keeping. I believed it. I still believe parts of it.
But something has shifted. And I'm not sure the deep work framework knows what to do with what's actually happening now.
I’m wrestling with the realization that while juggling three task’s simultaneously, I wasn't multitasking. Multitasking was always a myth... the science on this is unambiguous. We're just switching fast and losing a little each time. What I was doing felt different. More like running parallel processes that each needed a different part of me, at a cadence I got to control.
The op-ed needed the part of me that thinks slowly and argues with itself.
The copywriting agent needed the part of me that knows our voice well enough to correct someone else's version of it.
The sell sheet work needed the part of me that's spent years developing taste and can recognize when something is off before I know why.
None of those parts are the same. And none of them were being replaced by the tools.
They were being used by them.
Before all this agentic work, my output was directly proportional to my time. Hours in, words out. No other math.
Now I have something working alongside me. And what that's done is free up a specific kind of attention. The background processor. The part of your brain that's always running even when you're doing something else. The part that solves problems on walks, reorganizes overnight, hands you the answer in the shower.
The part that solves problems on walks, reorganizes overnight, hands you the answer in the shower.
When the foreground work stops requiring all of me, that part gets more room.
I think I'm doing more of my best thinking than I was two years ago. Not less.
That surprises me when I say it out loud.
But I hold it loosely. Because I've noticed what happens when I offload too readily. My thinking gets soft. My opinions get safer. Something I'd call my voice starts to thin out, like I'm diluting it without meaning to. And when I overcorrect... when I insist on doing everything myself out of some identity-protective reflex, some need to be the writer who doesn't need help... I produce the same volume I always did and miss everything the tools could have done.
The balance moves. Nobody told me where it was. Nobody could have.
The op-ed got finished. The copywriting agent is genuinely useful now... it's internalized enough of our voice that I trust its first drafts as a real starting point. The sell sheet work is ongoing. Teaching a system to have taste is apparently not a thing you do once.
The practice is this: figure out which part of your brain a given task actually needs. Then figure out whether that part is being used or being replaced.
We are all faking our way through this.
But some of us are paying attention while we do.