Switching Between Low Heat and High Heat
Recently, I spoke with a busy executive who was juggling a demanding day job, side entrepreneurial ventures, children, and trying to achieve several personal goals. Because he had so many things going on, everything felt rushed. Quite colorfully, he said about one of his personal goals around maintaining relationships, “You can’t create connections when you’re on fire.”
To spark solutions, I asked him, “What would happen if you focused on just one thing at a time?”
He understood why that approach could be useful, but eliminating activities felt difficult because it would, in his mind, mean declaring that he wouldn’t achieve some of the goals. As someone whose focus on achievement had enabled great success to date, that was hard to stomach.
The conversation reminded me of the experience of throwing dinner parties.
Planning typically begins at least three days in advance. If I’m cooking for a group of six or more, there’s a good chance that I’ll have to plan around diverse food preferences and dietary restrictions. The diverse preferences usually mean that a three-course meal requires six or more distinct dishes. And because I refuse to let anyone else in the kitchen during the preparation, there’s no way to put that meal together in just a few hours. After all, I’ve got the natural limit of having only two hands and a human brain that can only focus on one thing at a time.
Even though the focus limitation requires sequential processing, I’ll have multiple dishes cooking at once. I didn’t consciously articulate it until I spoke with the executive, but the reason that’s possible is that I toggle between high-heat and low-heat techniques.
When something’s on high heat, it requires extreme focus and precision, because inattention or being a few seconds off on timing can be the difference between a great dish and ruin. (It’s also sometimes the difference between burning your house down or not.) It’s like driving a Formula 1 car at top speed—daydreaming and multitasking will cause a crash.
But while you’re limited with high-heat techniques, you can do a lot of things in parallel, as long as they are at low heat. Hence, my meal plans always include dishes that require long periods of time in a sous vide machine, oven, or refrigerator, enabling them to continue cooking while I focus on the front-burner tasks—literally and figuratively. (By the way, a decent rule of thumb is that liquid dishes with a lot of ingredients—e.g., soups and stews—taste better the longer they sit together, so they’re almost always make-ahead opportunities.)
We can apply this same logic to our to-do lists. We can keep a lot of things on the list as long as we both limit the number of priorities that require full attention and diligently demote most everything else to forms of passive engagement. It’s the mix between high-heat and low-heat methods that enables keeping many projects in flight. The failure to do so is how one gets burned.
The other thing that happens whenever I’m preparing for a dinner party is that roughly four hours before start time, I’ll feel behind—regardless of where I am in the cooking plan. At that point, it feels overwhelming because there are too many tasks outstanding.
I call it the acceleration moment. That’s when I decide to bear down and eliminate items from the to-do list. I’ll do things like clean the bathroom, set the table, chill the wine, and fill the water bottles. Anything that takes just a few minutes to do happens in the acceleration moment.
After that burst of activity, I always feel ahead of the plan and in control. That’s important because if I have many outstanding tasks when guests arrive, my focus will be on the task list instead of building relationships with the people in front of me. As my client said, “You can’t create connections when you’re on fire.”