The Parallel Workbench
On having seventeen tabs open in your brain and finally finding somewhere to put them
My brain does not work in a straight line.
On any given day I might be mid-thought on a chapter of my book, pivot to a question about why my fish tank pH is off, get pulled into a strategic planning session for work, remember I meant to look up why my oven is making that noise, and then circle back to the book — except now I’ve lost the thread and I’m starting from scratch on what I was actually trying to say. Repeat. Indefinitely.
This is not chaos. This is just how my ADHD brain moves. It follows its own momentum instead of a tidy sequential to-do list. The problem has never been the ideas or the energy, it’s always been the cost of switching. Every time I had to set something down, I risked losing it in the abyss of my brain chaos. And the background hum of trying to hold seventeen threads at once while doing literally anything else is its own particular kind of exhausting.
Productivity systems promised to fix this, whether it was a Notion instance or the Getting Things Done methodology. But they didn’t. I have started and abandoned more “systems” than I can count. You can’t organize your way out of a brain that generates thoughts and ideas faster than any system can capture, and the maintenance overhead of most “solutions” created more cognitive load to manage than they absorbed.
What actually changed things was a lot less elegant than a system. I just started treating AI like a parallel workbench.
Both my parents were DIYers; my dad especially. And while his workbench was organized, it always held multiple things in various states of completion. He’d stick sticky notes on things to remember where he left off, or leave himself notes and lists to remember what needed doing next. It was his way of managing parallel workstreams, and when I think of that multi-project workbench, it really does resemble how I need to navigate my own brain.
Right now, while drafting this post, I have active conversations going about FY27 strategic planning for my team, the book I’m writing — a chapter of which I word-vomited into a chat on a train and came back to find coherently organized in a rough draft and waiting for me to resume — my garden and managing through an extreme heat wave, my fish tanks, a couple of home maintenance issues, and the newsletter series you’re reading right now, which I started weeks ago, had to set down for other work, and picked back up exactly where I left off without having to reconstruct a single thing. The context was just…there.
That last part is the piece that’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t have ADHD, and immediately obvious to someone who does. The task switching cost is real. Rebuilding context every time you return to something isn’t just annoying, it’s one of the main reasons projects stall, ideas die, and the things that matter most keep getting bumped by whatever is loudest in your brain right now. When the context is already held somewhere reliable, the re-entry is almost effortless. You just pick it back up, and you can even have your AI workbench remind you where you left off and what you were last thinking about or trying to solve.
The other thing worth saying because it’s usually the first objection: this isn’t AI doing the work, the writing or the thinking. My book is mine. I write better than AI does (because AI is all about probabilities, not the art of prose and communication) and I actually like writing. My strategic plan is mine. My thinking is mine. What I’ve offloaded is the organizational overhead of the holding, the tracking, and the threading together of disjointed pieces so the part of my brain that actually does the good work has room to operate.
For a long time I really thought my inability to work linearly was a flaw that needed correcting, and I fought upstream against that for years. Turns out I just needed a workbench big enough to hold all the projects at once.
Some prompts to try:
“I’m going to use this conversation as a running workspace for [project or area]. Here’s where things stand right now: [brain dump everything]. I may jump in and out of this — just hold the context and help me pick up where I left off each time I return.”
“I have several things competing for my attention right now and I can’t figure out where to start. Here’s everything that’s live: [list]. Help me figure out what actually needs my attention today versus what can wait, and what the single best next step is on each.”
Some things to reflect on:
How many active projects or threads are you currently trying to hold in your head? What does it cost you to keep track of all of them mentally?
Where do you most often lose momentum — is it the switching between things, the re-entry when you come back, or the pressure of feeling like you should be doing the other thing while you’re doing this one?
If you could offload the tracking and context-holding for your three most important projects, what would you do with that freed-up mental space?
What’s a project that’s been stalling not because you don’t care about it but because the overhead of picking it back up keeps winning?
This is clever. I don’t know if I have ADHD. It “didn’t exist” when I was growing up. I do have multiple threads running in my head all the time and I found leaving notes for myself in documents was an excellent way to pick up where I left off and reduced the ramp up time. And brain dumps with permission to return later for fixing also works well for me. So, I may try your technique just to see.