Nobody Juggles Alone

Three weeks of solo parenting will teach you things productivity advice never will.

My coparent couldn't exercise visitation. I had all three kids, full-time, while trying to ship a complex piece of engineering software at work. Homeschooling during the day, meetings squeezed into margins, coding late into the evening. Somewhere around day four, I realized the productivity framework I'd been operating under was a lie.

You know the Dyson metaphor. Work is rubber balls, family is glass balls. Drop work, it bounces back. Drop family, it shatters. Prioritize accordingly.

Here's the problem: there are no rubber balls.

The Taxonomy Is Wrong

The original metaphor objectifies the people in your life. It turns them into things you're managing, priorities you're ranking. But that's not how any of this works.

People aren't balls. People are your juggling partners. The balls are the things passing between you: tasks, expectations, pieces of trust, promises you've made. You're constantly catching and throwing with the people in your life. Your kids. Your coworkers. Your stakeholders. Your friends. Your family.

And every single one of those balls is glass.

When I drop something with my stakeholder at work, that's not rubber bouncing harmlessly. That's a promise I made about a delivery timeline. That's trust I asked them to extend. When I drop it, something cracks. Maybe small. Maybe repairable. But something real breaks.

The productivity industry's clean taxonomy of "droppable" versus "non-droppable" is a comforting lie. It obscures what's actually happening: triage under constrained circumstances. You're not choosing between things that matter and things that don't. You're choosing which relationships absorb the damage.

What Shattering Actually Looks Like

One evening during that first week, I was deep in the code. This project was brutal. I'd planned to leverage AI tooling to move fast, a promise of efficiency that was supposed to buy me margin. Instead, the tool couldn't handle the domain complexity. Every hour I spent trying to make it work was an hour stolen from something else. The productivity hack became a productivity trap.

My daughter came up to me while I was typing. She was excited. She'd gotten three stars on something in her learning platform. She wanted to share it with me.

I didn't even look up. I was exasperated. A little sarcastic. Something like "Do you guys not see I'm focused here?"

She's sweet. She apologized. But I watched her face change. Surprise. Then something else.

Betrayal.

I'm using that word intentionally. Not to moralize, but to name honestly what the person on the other end of a dropped ball actually experiences. She came to me with excitement, with celebration, and I gave her exasperation and sarcasm. She went to her room to compose herself.

The irony cuts deep. A tool designed to save me time was the very thing that stole the moment from my daughter. All that sunk cost chasing digital efficiency, and the real cost was the shattered look on her face.

And here's what made it worse: after she left, I went right back to typing. Because I was dropping things with my stakeholders too. I'd said we'd have this done by end of week. It wasn't happening.

Both were glass. Both shattered when they hit the ground.

The Quiet Exit

I talked to my daughter later. Apologized. We're good. But here's what haunts me about dropped obligations: most of the time, you don't learn what it felt like on the other end.

That's the dangerous part. You don't know how many more tosses someone will risk if you keep missing. You don't know if they want to keep juggling with you at all.

A small subset of your relationships will make it clear when the betrayal hurt. They'll tell you. They'll push back. Those relationships are gifts, even when the conversations are hard.

But most people? When you're consistently failing to catch what they throw, they just stop throwing. No confrontation. No explanation. Just silence where the rhythm used to be. You wake up one day and realize nothing's coming your way anymore. The danger isn't the noise of shattering. It's the absence of the next toss. The weight that never arrives.

I had a close friend throughout middle school and high school. Corry. We tried to maintain the friendship into adulthood. But I was missing his throws. Not reaching back out. Not sending anything his way. Life got in the way. There were other people to juggle with. And one day the exchange just stopped.

That's not the only relationship I've lost that way. Most people have experienced this: the slow fade, the quiet exit, the relationship that died not from conflict but from accumulated failures to catch and throw.

Wilson

In Cast Away, Tom Hanks is stranded alone on an island. No one to juggle with. Total isolation. What does he do?

He invents someone.

Wilson. A volleyball with a face drawn in blood. Tom Hanks talks to Wilson. Argues with Wilson. Relies on Wilson. When Wilson floats away and is lost at sea, it's the most devastating moment in the film. More emotionally gutting than the plane crash. More than the years of isolation.

He lost his juggling partner.

Even in complete isolation, humans can't actually juggle alone. We need someone on the other end. The exchange only matters because it's passing between us. Productivity isn't personal. It's relational. It always was.

The atomistic fantasy of the Dyson metaphor, where you're standing alone managing your priorities, is exactly that: a fantasy. You're always juggling with someone. The question isn't how to optimize your individual performance. The question is who's going to keep the rhythm going when things shatter.

The Surgeon General Gets It Wrong

The Surgeon General recently flagged parental burnout as a public health crisis. The advice that followed was predictable: time audits, delegation, self-care routines. Individual optimization.

It misses the point entirely.

Parents are doing more direct interaction with children than previous generations. That's documented. But the other half of the equation is that we're more isolated than we've ever been. I remember being watched by grandparents, by friends' parents. One of my best friends today is someone whose mom watched me as a baby. I've known him since birth.

That kind of community infrastructure barely exists anymore. Everyone's juggling their own overwhelming load. The reciprocity networks that used to absorb the shock of hard seasons have fractured.

The parental burnout crisis isn't going to be solved by time audits. It's going to be solved by more people willing to juggle together. More partners means more things stay in the air. The velocity stays manageable. The trajectory stays predictable. You can't catch everything alone. You were never supposed to.

Repair Is Constant

I'm not writing this from the other side of those three weeks. I'm writing from the trenches. This is ongoing. The insight isn't retrospective. It's happening right now.

Which means repair has to be constant. You can't wait until the crisis is over and then start fixing things. By then, people have already quietly exited.

While writing this post, I sent a text to my dad and brother. I'd made plans with them, then realized I'd forgotten my daughter has dance class. Another dropped promise. Another small betrayal. The text was simple: "I totally messed up. I thought Tuesday was free but it wasn't. Want to reschedule to Wednesday? Or you guys can go without me. Really sorry."

That's what repair looks like. Not a novel explaining your guilt. Just honesty about the mistake, and an effort to fix it. Over and over. Every day.

I went and talked to my daughter after that evening when I snapped at her. She was apologizing to me. For my mistake. That was heartbreaking. I told her she didn't need to apologize. Her dad messed up. We talked about it. We're okay.

But they add up. All these tiny cracks. Nobody's going to be perfect. Part of being alive is learning from your mistakes without letting them drag you down. I understand what I did wrong. I understand what I need to watch for.

Trying to Build the Net

I can feel some relationships starting to pull back. I notice it happening in real time. There's only so much bandwidth a person has. Circumstance is making it harder, and the weight of everything keeps accumulating.

That's the cost of constrained circumstances. You're doing triage. And triage means some things don't get treated. Some relationships absorb damage you can't immediately repair.

The hard part is that I don't know how long "this" is. There's been this continuous feeling that it's imminently going to go back to normal. That I'll have more margin. That the crisis will end. So I haven't committed to building the infrastructure because I keep thinking I won't need it.

I've taken one step. My friend's son has been watching the kids for me. It's not a full support system, but it's a start. One more person willing to catch something when I can't.

The question I keep coming back to isn't "how do I optimize my personal productivity." The question is: who's going to keep the rhythm going with me when things shatter?

Because things are going to shatter. All of them are glass. The clean taxonomy was always a lie.

Nobody juggles alone. Not even Tom Hanks on a deserted island. The sooner we accept that productivity is relational rather than personal, the sooner we can start asking the right questions.

Not "what can I drop?" but "who's going to help me catch?"

I'm trying to build a net while I'm still falling. It's slow, it's awkward, and I'm still dropping things.