What does Juggling Projects have to do with Paying Attention?

"I am unable to talk to anybody who doesn't appear to be paying attention, because I am unable to listen to someone I'm not paying attention to."
    - Steve Gibson, Episode 457 of "Security Now" podcast.

When I heard Steve Gibson utter those words I felt a great surge of affinity. Personally, I have never understood when someone I am talking to suddenly breaks away or turns away to pay attention to some other task or person momentarily, yet when questioned usually proclaims: "No, it's ok. I'm still listening". Like Steve I will usually find myself automatically pausing myself and waiting to see if and when that person will resume paying attention to me. When that pause becomes too great, I simply wander away and resume some other more interesting task.

To say I find it annoying... would be true.

However, like Steve, I usually just park that frustration and move on.

It's actually quite reassuring to see I'm not the only one who experiences this. If anything, one of the things I have learnt to recognise is that my tendency to think a certain way in no way means that everyone else thinks that way!

So, what does this have to do with juggling projects?

On said episode of Security Now, Steve was asked:

Listening to Episode 456 made me wonder, how do you juggle so many projects? Could you share your methodology on project management, Steve?

Short version of Steve's answer: he obsessively monotasks. Which dovetails with the idea mentioned above about being unable to talk to someone who appears not to be paying attention! Steve talks about how when a new task comes up before the old is completed, he can choose to completely switch to the new task and obsessively focus on that instead. The process may repeat over, again pushing the current task out of the way to make way for the new - presumably higher priority - task.

At this point, I found myself completely envious that he could "afford" to operate that way. I work in IT Technical Support and the one thing you can pretty much guarantee in a Support Role is that you will be interrupted regularly - either by people seeking help, or by computers and applications breaking down! Steve's "interruptions" are chosen by him, and in each case he is able to spend days or weeks on the newly selected task. My interruptions are such that my internal "stack" of interrupted tasked gets blown out each day and I consider myself lucky if I get even an hour of uninterrupted time to work on any single task.

Interestingly, Steve says:

"... I would argue that I juggle projects badly."

However a quick google on the topic reveals that Monotasking is the new Multitasking so I don't think Steve is doing too badly.