One of the BBEGs of the PM job is the cost of context-switching. In any given day I’m moving between strategy, design review, engineering scoping, customer interviews, GTM alignment, compliance back-and-forth, and the inbox. None of those require deep skill in isolation — the skill is keeping track of every thread at once without letting any of them fray.
This is why scaffolding like the pomodoro technique and time-blocking matters more for PMs than for ICs working a single discipline. We’re not protecting flow — we’re trying to manufacture a sliver of it inside fundamentally fragmented days.
Still to write
My own juggling pattern across an Arattai week — what threads I’m holding, where they collide, and the moves I’ve found that keep them from fraying.
Threads to dig into:
- Whether some PMs build a “main lane” — one big surface they go deep on — and treat the rest as overhead
- The difference between context switching (costly) and context refresh (sometimes productive — coming back to a problem with fresh eyes)
- How seniority changes the shape: junior PMs juggle tasks, senior PMs juggle stakeholders, principals juggle strategies