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Crushing It

During the corporate phase of my career, I marveled at the people who could tick off tasks on various projects like it was their job. 

Okay, it was their job. And by “marvel,” I kind of mean “was disgusted by.” 

Ticking off things is valuable. 

It’s what tech companies want of any product manager (or project-). 

But what I witnessed in those who were the best at this skill was this: 

They didn’t fucking care. 

What mattered to them was movement. Progress. 

We can all agree on an academic level that these things are paramount in business. But these people clearly got intrinsic value out of it. 

To them, each task was like one move in Candy Crush. They couldn’t care about: 

• Sound strategy

• User-interface quality

• Beautiful outcomes

Artists and authors and Steve Jobs care about those things. 

These people just wanted to win Candy Crush. 

The question I wrestle with is, how do they not care? 

Equally important, how do they make tangible progress in more than one project in parallel? 

If you can’t succeed at these behaviors, your ability to scale will face a harsh limit.

Compartmentalization is the skill we need: To put each thing—that client conversation, that breakup, that investment—in a box.

It’s a skill, but for some of you, I have bad news.

Do you want the bad news—or the worse news?

Science on attention, focus, and meaning shows that people are naturally worse at compartmentalization than others. 

The news gets worse: Some of you may be obscenely good at compartmentalizing chaos, leading you to THINK you’re an overall good compartmentalizer. But you might be poor at compartmentalizing meaning. 

You may be the calm when other people are freaking out—like a firefighter or a Navy SEAL. Nevertheless, when things are normal, you might imbue standard meetings and minor emails with too much meaning. 

The result? Your energy and time are drained… by inconsequential stuff.

But, like most things, our natural abilities are just a starting point. We can develop our ability to compartmentalize. 

Monotaskers vs. Multitrackers

You probably know that multitasking is a myth. We can’t do more than one thing at a time (with rare exceptions). 

However, people who compartmentalize well can multitrack. In other words, they effectively push various priorities forward in parallel within a day. 

There are two broad tendencies. One often compartmentalizes tasks and emotions better than the other.

Type A: Monotaskers – More likely to struggle with compartmentalizing
Those of you who are inquisitive or seek deep meaning are likely to fall into Type A: Monotaskers. You crave deep focus. This includes engineers, researchers, and artists. To generalize, this group is dominated by introverts. From another angle, this group tends to have high conscientiousness with low novelty-seeking. They get dopamine from depth, not variety.  

Type B: Multitrackers – Tend to compartmentalize tasks more easily
Meanwhile, founders, PMs, military leaders, consultants, and salespeople tend to be Type B: Multitrackers. They often crave novelty and see less meaning in each task. These folks generally have high flexibility in their working memory. And they are fueled by variety. 

Sound compartmentalizers—regardless of type—tend to have the following characteristics:

1. Less salience flooding 

2. Better inhibitory control

3. Lower threat reactivity / generalization

4. Lower emotional contagion

5. Higher cognitive modularity 

6. Lower future simulation 

Whew, that’s a lot of jargon. Let’s break down what we need to do: 

✅  MECHANISM 1 — Reduce Salience Activation

(How strongly things feel “important,” “meaningful,” or “identity-linked”)

If you are a monotasker, here are some possible problem areas:

• Salience flooding: You experience too many signals as important at once, which overwhelms focus.

• Emotional tagging: You attach emotional importance to most tasks.

• Autobiographical linking: You readily tie tasks or setbacks to “who you are” or what your future means.

• Sensitivity to ambiguity: Ambiguous situations cause tension or mental activation for you.

• Associative thinking: Your mind automatically leaps from one idea to related ideas across domains.
  

📌 Adopt this mechanism: 

1. “Shrink the Frame” labeling
Describe tasks in literal, neutral language to reduce meaning assignment. Example: “Send message = done.”

2. Ambiguity downgrading
When something is unclear, explicitly classify it as: “Low-threat unknown, not a meaning signal.”

3. Anti-narrative training
Practice noticing when you’re building a story—and cut it off at the first inference.

✅ MECHANISM 2 — Improve Inhibitory Control

(Your ability to stop or block intrusive thoughts/emotions)

We want to halt emotional or cognitive impulses. Strong compartmentalizers:

• “Task shield”: Adept at preventing irrelevant emotional or mental content from entering “active focus.”

• Have a lower rumination baseline: Some people naturally stop thinking about unresolved issues; you tend to loop. 

📌 Adopt this mechanism: 

1. “Stop rule” training
Practice literally saying “Stop” internally when a thought intrudes, then return to task.

2. Breath-gate reset
Use a 4-second exhale to re-engage the prefrontal cortex and regain inhibitory control.

3. Get reps
Short bursts of uninterrupted focus strengthen the brain’s inhibition circuits. Aim for just 10-20 minutes in the beginning. Put your device in another room. 

✅ MECHANISM 3 — Lower Threat Reactivity / Generalization

(How quickly emotional threat spills into all areas)

Good compartmentalizers only feel danger where it actually is. Others tend to exaggerate the threat AND to extend one specific risk into a general feeling of fear.

📌 Adopt this mechanism: 

1. Threat localization
Ask: “Where exactly is the threat? Is it here, or am I importing it?”

2. Safety cues
Create small rituals (breath, posture, grounding) that signal your nervous system: “Not a battlefield.”

3. Precision mapping
Write a 1-sentence truth: “The threat is in X, not in Y or Z.”

✅ MECHANISM 4 — Lower Emotional Contagion

(Not absorbing others’ moods or emotional states)

People who compartmentalize well feel others’ emotions as data—not as internal experiences. (Watch out, people-pleasers.)

📌 Adopt this mechanism: 

1. “Theirs, not mine” labeling
When you feel someone else’s emotion inside you, name it as: “Not my state.”

2. Slow mirroring
Delay your empathic response by 2–3 seconds — this breaks automatic absorption.

3. Emotional distancing questions
Ask: “What are they feeling? What am I feeling?” (Keeps boundaries intact.)

✅ MECHANISM 5 — Higher Cognitive Modularity

(How cleanly you switch mental “files” and prevent bleedover)

Multitrackers exhibit a couple forms of this mechanism, which you may lack: 

1. Increased task shielding: This refers to the ability to block irrelevant tasks from intruding while doing another.

2. More automatic context switches: They can drop Task A instantly and pick up Task B without residue.

📌 Adopt this mechanism:

1. Hard stops / hard starts
Use short rituals between tasks (stand up, breathe, close tab) to reset the file. See my recent newsletter on transitions, where we discuss entry/exit rituals. 

2. “Later folder” capture
Start by writing intrusive thoughts into a single list each day so it stops running in the background. The black-belt move is to let most stray thoughts go. (But baby steps, grasshopper.) 

3. Single-thread windows
Designate blocks where only one domain is allowed (e.g., relationships only from 7–9pm).

✅ MECHANISM 6 — Lower Future Simulation Load

(How much you project into the future, imagine outcomes, or run scenarios)

People who compartmentalize well don’t imagine futures or consequences as vividly; things stay local.

(This one is funny, because what is normally a weakness becomes the multitracker’s strength.) 

📌 Adopt this mechanism: 

1. Contain the timeline
Keep projections to near-term only (“What’s true in the next 24 hours?”).

2. Identify the jump point
Notice exactly where you leap from “now” → “future story” and stop the chain at the first hop.

3. Future minimalism
Ask: “How can I constrain the scenarios and variables I need to consider in order to take action?”

Putting It All Together: Be a Better Multitracker

If you’re already a multitracker and humored me all this way, thanks for reading :) 

For all of those who struggle with compartmentalization, realize you have your strengths. But when you hear people online talk about how they’re “stuck in their own head,” they’re talking, at least in part, about people who stay stuck on one task—too deeply, for too long. 

So without the jargon, here’s a summary of the actions above: 

1. MECHANISM 1: Don’t imbue every task with meaning. 
2. MECHANISM 2: Halt impulses—intellectual and emotional. 
3. MECHANISM 3: Make your feeling of danger smaller in some way. 
4. MECHANISM 4: Create boundaries between what you experience and what others feel. 
5. MECHANISM 5: Improve your ability to leave a task behind and move on. 
6. MECHANISM 6: Stop trying to predict the future all the time. Be a goldfish. 

 ❤️ Andrew

Outro

Alice In Chains, “Man In the Box.” 

Cheers

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Get unstuck, and crush it. Double period. 🔱