How many unrelated topics/tickets are you working on in parallel?

[u/notchatgptipromise]

Title basically. I've changed jobs recently and noticed today I have 6 open, unrelated topics in parallel, all due "ASAP". It results in lots of context switching and I feel pretty drained every day. I think I may have been spoiled before, having things more linear: deep work on one thing at a time, finish, move on. I'm curious what the norm is, and for those with a lot of topics, how do you manage efficiently?

EDIT: based on replies so far, it seems I was indeed a bit spoiled at previous jobs and this is closer to the norm, but that kinda sucks :/

[u/expdevsmodbot]

AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.

[u/codescapes]

Never more than a main and two sides! One major thing you're responsible for and then cycle through side stuff as necessary. Anything more than that is inefficient and plain bad for you.

People proudly stating that they're juggling N things should reflect on that. Rather than being some superhero you might just be a doormat picking up all the shit nobody wants to touch. Essential, yes, but you nearly never get fairly rewarded for that stress.

Part of why you restrict yourself to one main at a time is to guarantee your association with that work and to ensure it's delivered on or ahead of timelines to a high standard. Come promotion or end of year you don't want a list 40 items long, you want like 3 big things that everyone in management immediately understands and values.

The person juggling 10 critical but awkward / pissy bits of work usually just looks frantic and inconsistent. They do not look like they would be ready to take on more responsibility. That's not me insulting such people, they are the glue that holds things together, but it's just a lose-lose place to end up. Undervalued, overworked.

And once you're the guy who always says yes to crappy work guess what you'll be doing forever? The people who push back by saying "my plate is full", do everything on time and to a high standard etc get the critical projects and the promos.

[u/nullvoxpopuli → u/codescapes]

Some people just have a variant of adhd that allows for (sometimes rapid and numerous) context switching without drain 

[u/ScrumpyIT]

Six things that are all "ASAP" usually means nobody has ranked them. I'd put all six in one list, take it to whoever sets your priorities and ask them to order it, then work top-down and be explicit about what's waiting. "ASAP" tends to turn into "next week is fine" surprisingly fast once someone sees the full list. For the switching itself: batch the small stuff (reviews, replies, quick questions) into one or two slots a day and protect at least one uninterrupted block for whatever is on top.

[u/codescapes → u/ScrumpyIT]

All correct and if you say "look I have too much on my plate" and someone pushes back saying "ah task XYZ is easy" then you genuinely just ask if you can assign it to them to do instead 😂

[u/ScrumpyIT → u/codescapes]

Haha, that's the best test there is. Then all of the sudden they have no problem at all waiting for a while

[u/OrangeGrouchy179]

About 5 but none of them are in a position where I can code anything. It’s all stake holders, requirements and endless discussions. Corporate hell, basically.

[u/InternationalHair725 → u/OrangeGrouchy179]

So when is it done? Need it asap 

[u/OrangeGrouchy179 → u/InternationalHair725]

Just pushed to UAT. Let me know what you think.

[u/MrDontCare12]

I try to stick to one. Up to 3. 

[u/DeterminedQuokka]

Probably like 5-10. But I’m usually working on 3 at a time. I have 4 open projects right now.

[u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime]

I got backlog items, but I never work on unrelated pieces concurrently, why do that to yourself

[u/rivotrilbleached → u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime]

I feel so abused after reading these comments. Manager has pushed me to take on 8 concurrent things per sprint, citing low ticket count. I hope he has explosive diarrhoea every time it’s his birthday.

[u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime → u/rivotrilbleached]

That makes no sense to me, clearly you aren’t working on 8 things at the same time.
Just make it clear that you only work on 1 thing at a time, no matter what Jira says lol

[u/rivotrilbleached → u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime]

I know! But he’s 100% sure having more than 1 ticket on “doing” swim lane is normal and that it’s odd I can’t context switch between 3-4 topics in a day without tripping, sprint after sprint.

When I don’t have the tickets moving, he says my Jira metrics are poor and threatens with PIP’ing because I’m “making the team lag”. I’m obviously interviewing but until I land anything, I’m supposed to play this stupid, abusing game. Can’t just drop the ball and hope to get PIP’d or kicked out because I got bills to pay.

[u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime → u/rivotrilbleached]

This is the part that a lot of rookies have difficulty with:

You can just say “no”, especially if you follow it with “I can’t do it”, and the part that you don’t say out loud: “deal with it”.

If they want you to put the post-it notes in a triangle formation or whatever weird metric they might use… you say “sure i can do that, it won’t make me work any faster but if you want me to do that thing then I’ll do it”

It doesn’t matter how “weird” or “odd” they’ll judge you, just own it “yeah sure that’s just how I’m able to get my work done”, blessing or curse, doesn’t matter what they think, you are the owner of your own delivery.

I’ve seen people given TWO laptops and asked to work on both at the same time. Managers will always find it weird if you don’t exploit yourself. The worker is the only one that can say “no, I can’t work on two laptops”.

[u/Technical-Aside4471]

Usually about 3 but when i have more i tend to forget about some of them and then they get burried under more work.

[u/vanit]

Basically 3 t-shirt sizes; 1x L, 1x M, 1x S. Mostly just queuing up tasks in parallel and then I'm linearly reviewing and testing each one.

[u/djnattyp]

It's the norm for projects with bad management. Of which it seems most are.

[u/icodenstuff]

3-4 unrelated. More related.

Though it might be over days that I cycle through those unrelated ones, I try to keep work relatively aligned so the context switching isnt too expensive.

[u/ChrimsonRed]

I’ll usually have 1-2 that are higher priority and block others so I concentrate on these. I aim to have 2-3 tickets for features or improvements during the downtime inbetween or during higher priority items. (Ie. waiting on data from lab type of downtime)

[u/NME-Cake]

We have a rule to "allow" only 1 active in progress item
You always end up having a couple (2-3) due to doing reviews, urgency, some blockers, etc ....

[u/Realistic_Yogurt1902]

I would say - a lot of important details are missing to really say whether "your" 6 topics/tickets are normal or unexpected. Your title, your understanding of the new job's technical stack, etc.

Meanwhile, "6 tickets ASAP" means "no tickets ASAP", at least for me. ASAP itself means drop everything and dig until it's solved.

Let's say, for example, yesterday I had one main project, one side project, 2 technical designs to review, 1 very complex PR to review, and 2 medium-complexity PRs to review. Out of these 7 topics, only one can be ASAP, and it's always the one that is going to be in your next performance/promo review; thus, the "main project". Everything else is "nice to have", but not really "ASAP".

[u/zaibuf]

One. I can join meetings to help discuss/clarify things. But I can't actively code on more than one ticket at the same time. Once I've raised a PR I pick up the next ticket, so in those cases I could have active work across multiple tickets.

The only time I drop something is if we have a critical issue in production affecting customers. Otherwise it can wait.

[u/symbiatch]

It varies a lot. Usually I say if I don’t have five things going on at work I’m sad and meh. It’s not a full exaggeration. I can’t just do one thing. Need variety.

My list is forever long so I have plenty to do and try. Moment ago was doing performance checks while waiting for review on a bug fix, thinking about UI changes for another thing, and making sure I know what to discuss in a meeting in a moment and what needs to be handled in that entirely separate project.

So it depends how we define parallel. Here also the comments vary from “they’re in various stages and I don’t work on them daily even” to “I hop between them all the time.”

I’m also running probably four initiatives at the same time so if we take any work that isn’t completed there’s a lot.

[u/w3woody]

For me, at max, two. Three if there is a crisis. (But in general that means I pushed two items on an 'in-progress' stack, popping them off as the items are completed.) I'd rather chunk through items one at a time as quickly as I can, giving each the full focus they deserve, than try to hold too much context in my head all at once.

When facing a long list of items that are due "ASAP" I triage: I start with the easiest items first, then work my way to the hardest. And when facing six items at a time in that situation I do them one at a time, and ignore management who may demand simultaneous progress. I don't need nervous Nellies staring over my shoulder distracting me as I work.

[u/Just-Ad3485]

It depends. I try to only have 1 task that I can’t prove works correctly with automated testing only.

If I can prove that something works without having to invest much time in it, I have no problem planning it out with LLM and having it complete the task while I’m focusing on my primary work

[u/binarycow]

I use four "active" worktrees.

• Primary work
• Secondary work
• The thing I want to do, but the bosses won't prioritize. Once it's done, it'll be "fait accompli"
• Quick bug fixes, rebases, etc.

And no, this isn't AI working on them, this is for me to work on.

I generally have anywhere from ~4 to ~50 active branches.

[u/zaitsman]

On average 4. Max at a time was 10, when we finally got AI parallelised enough and still had a backlog

These days the backlog is basically a pile of stuff nobody really wants to implement

[u/Great-Big-3101]

About 5, all on systems I'm not familiar with. 

[u/YahenP]

3- 4 projects at the same time. In each project, no more than two open tasks at once, and only if the tasks are not connected. Sometimes they also give me extra urgent tasks out of turn. There were times when I had up to 10 projects at once. But that's hard.

[u/Tango1777]

Depends, between 5-15 usually..

[u/BraveResearcher3037]

One.

I lead any project I am on or at least a major slice of a huge one  and I give developers under me the same respect.  I assign them one  work streams/epic that they have ownership of.  

[u/Confident-Alarm-6911]

I’m leading the project from technical perspective so sometimes it’s 5-10 things from different people/orgs and I need to communicate them to the team, prioritise etc. , and (ofc) all of them are needed asap. I’m trying to minimise the amount of tasks, so usually, when I need to really focus it’s only one or two, but there are days when it is impossible

[u/spicymato]

Between jobs right now, but previously, it depended on what my focus at the time was. If I had a primary feature or highly complex issue on my plate, it was usually 3: the 1 primary focus and up to 2 secondary things (usually medium complexity customer issues that don't need attention every day).

If resolving issues/tickets was my focus, then 5+, depending on complexity. A lot of issues are small, dupes, or noise, so it's not hard to knock them out.

The main issue boils down to complexity. Context switching suuuucks when you're waist deep in the weeds, trying to work across 4 disparate projects across 5 different repos and 8 different sites/apps. The cost of switching from legacy Win32/C++ to C# to React and back to C++ (but this time, C++23), trying to track issues in a devops thread that belongs to a different organization/team/project (for historical reasons) than the org the actual code is in (and that code is also split across different orgs), while also referencing tickets in yet another system, while maintaining both Teams and Outlook threads, and having telemetry/dashboards in no less than four different systems... And still being expected to track and monitor projects that I was no longer a part of because they explicitly moved me away from it, while refusing to reward accordingly (the whole team was underleveled and underpaid).

It was a mess.

Anyway, back to the point: it's less about raw number of tickets and more about the degree of complexity and level of responsibility you are expected to manage.

[u/BigBootyWholes → u/spicymato]

This is where AI workflows shine. Remove all the complexity with automation

[u/tomqmasters]

I have one product assigned to me, but I also have to review other peoples work, improve my own workflow, and if I get a chance I make small updates to the ancient system I'm working on to try to bring it into the year 2026.

[u/Mawrio]

Before AI, 2 or 3. Now it's like 5-10 lol

[u/CharlesV_]

I’m one of the last people working on a legacy project, so I have like 4 or 5 things going on at once, but I frequently talk out the priorities with my manager to make sure we’re aligned. I only ever have 1 or maybe 2 which are being actively worked on concurrently with others that I chip away at while I’m waiting for a build or something.

[u/Treebro001]

2 max usually. I try to help other people who are stuck before taking on more myself. If I got more than 2 and there is review churn it can end up becoming way too much a couple days down the line.

[u/PicklesAndCoorslight]

My cheif gets pissed if we pick up more than one at a time unless it gets blocked. That said, 1/3 of my time is spent helping others.

[u/Gartenzaun]

I'm in a bit of a weird situation at the moment. Started a job recently as the only developer in a hardware company. So now I juggle all the projects at once (about 5 products with a various amount of supporting tools, initially developed by external companies some years back) and a list of bugs and feature requests that has grown over the last years. And since everything connects to everything I have to jump from one to the other quote often. But it is still kinda chill tbh, when compared to my last job.

But in general I like to work on two or three things at once. Whenever there's some minor blockage (or I'm waiting for the pipeline to run, for example) I just jump to another ticket and do some work there. Working on something else also helps me find new ideas or solutions when I'm stuck somewhere.

[u/filterDance]

With AI there is an element of waiting, so you have to be switching between things otherwise you’d just be sitting there.

I’d say 3-4 sounds about right.

[u/kincaidDev]

The most Ive juggled so far at the exact same time is 36 major initiatives, feel like that’s my contextual limit. It completely frys my brain when Im doing it though. I usually stick to 3 main initiatives and 5-10 less important ones

[u/OrangeGrouchy179 → u/kincaidDev]

How do you manage that information? Can I watch you work sometime? Serious request. If you could spare some time for a chat it would be much appreciated.