How to balance competing threads of work

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

As you become more senior in your career, managing concurrent open threads of work becomes especially important. 

Last year, I received some thoughtful feedback from my manager. He observed that I worked best when focusing on a small number of tasks/projects at a time. However, he encouraged me to try and become more comfortable with multiple ongoing projects, citing that as my career grew, so would my responsibilities, and it wouldn’t always be possible to only focus on one thing at a time.

In the six months that followed my review, I made a conscious effort to try out different strategies in order to effectively juggle and make progress on competing priorities without getting overwhelmed. I’m happy to say that I am much better at balancing open threads of work today than I was a year ago. Here is my methodology for achieving that balance.

Identify your threads of work

Before effectively balancing multiple responsibilities, you must know what you are responsible for. You’ll want to start by identifying all of your threads of work.

Some roles will have more threads than others. An individual contributor (IC) may need to balance the implementation of one project and the planning of another. For managers, the thread count may be much higher as they have even more concurrent threads to balance. For example, I am currently balancing three threads: 

• Hiring to fill open roles for a new team
• Working with product to scope the work for the new team 
• Conducting technical research to identify blockers and dependencies for this team’s scope. 

Soon, I’ll add a fourth thread to the mix: supporting the engineers who will be joining the new team. 

Regardless of your title, you’ll still need to answer one question before proceeding: what initiatives do you own that you need to advance forward?

Get organized

Once you’ve identified your responsibilities, get yourself organized. 

First, release the mental load of juggling multiple tasks. The easiest way to solve this problem is to outsource your memory to a tool. There are many to choose from, but I like to keep a notebook at my desk at all times, with a weekly to-do list that captures all of my concurrent threads and the next steps for each of them. I use color coding to help me visually differentiate all of my different threads of work and make sure that I’m making progress on each of them. Sticky notes, a long-running text document, or even a whiteboard could also work nicely here.

The second step is to break down each thread. Which responsibilities are time-sensitive? Which ones are dependent on other people, other pieces of work, or some other external factor? What tasks are recurring and will require the same time commitment from you each day or week, and which ones are one-offs that will disappear as quickly as they showed up? Answering these questions will help you identify inter-thread dependencies, prioritize your work, and effectively budget your time so that you can accomplish all of your tasks.

Continuously prioritize

Once you’ve organized all of your work, you can start prioritizing your tasks. Prioritization is a practice – you will need to do it again, and again, and again.

Over time, I’ve developed a process that works well for me. I like to start each week with a checklist of tasks that help me advance on each of my threads. I organize my to-do list to clearly see all of my responsibilities and the next steps for each. 

Before a new week begins, I refine and reprioritize my to-do list. I look through the next steps for all of my projects and identify which ones need immediate attention and which ones can wait. This helps me focus on the right areas and allocate my time effectively. Sometimes, a new task unexpectedly lands on the list, and it supersedes last week’s priority. Other times, things that I have deprioritized in the previous week become the priority in the next week’s to-do list. For example, if you are trying to close an open role on your team on a tight timeline, you may find that the hiring workflow needs to become your biggest priority for the week, de-prioritizing other tasks in its place.  

No matter your prioritization approach, it’s crucial to hone a methodology that identifies what each of your responsibilities needs from you every week.

Returning to a checklist, daily and weekly, keeps you on top of all of your responsibilities. When combined with an efficient prioritization practice, you’ll have an in-the-weeds view of how you should spend your time on a given day. You’ll also gain a big-picture perspective on workflows that need extra time and attention.

---

London • June 16 & 17, 2025

Speakers Gergely Orosz, Camille Fournier and Lara Hogan confirmed.

See who else is speaking

Reflect and refine

Getting organized about your work and developing a prioritization practice for all of your responsibilities gives you a bird’s eye view of your work.

For example, if you find that you are constantly de-prioritizing one responsibility without any consequences, you may not need to be doing that task at all. For instance, if you’re a manager who keeps trying to add “writing code” to their to-do list but can’t find the time to do so, it could very well be a sign that it’s time to let it go. Alternatively, suppose you notice that an important task keeps getting tabled because of other priorities. In that case, you should delegate to someone else or ask your manager if you can have something else removed from your plate.

Over time, you’ll better understand how many open threads you can realistically balance at once. This is particularly important in the long term because you’ll inevitably need to know what your maximum capacity is. For example, if you have too many threads in a given week, you’ll be able to use your prioritization practice in order to figure out which threads need to be put on ice temporarily.

Final thoughts 

As you grow in your career as an engineering leader, your scope will inevitably increase. As your responsibilities change and grow, you’ll have to balance more threads concurrently. Admittedly, it might all feel very uncomfortable to you at first, but if you can figure out a system that allows you to stay on top of all of your tasks and keep pushing them forward, not only can you handle more scope as your role grows, but you can also show those around you that you are accountable, reliable, and more than capable of staying on top of many different things at once.