Midlife multitasking: making room to put a few plates down

Midlife multitasking: making room to put a few plates down

Airport coffee. Milan-bound for a day of training. I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoy these little pockets of time where life gets stripped back for a day or two: no school runs, no life admin, no coordinating everyone else’s needs, schedules or problems. Just one thing to focus on.

While smelling all the perfume, I got chatting with an assistant at Jo Malone. We ended up talking about how much of adult life gets spent caring for other people in one way or another: children, partners, parents, patients, colleagues and friends. We were at different stages with different stories, but it was a very familiar theme.

It feels a treat these days to have a couple of days where the only person I need to think about is me. I often hear this echoed in consultations, and it has got me wondering.

Why does work become the break?

How much of this increasing need for space is perimenopause? How much is what happens after years at the coalface, holding a lot of things for a lot of people? How much is fatigue, a type of burnout, or simply getting older and realising we do not actually want — or need — to carry everything anymore?

For many women I know, work becomes the break. Not because work is easy. Far from it. But because for a few hours the focus narrows: one role, one task, one problem, compared with the endless plate-spinning that can happen outside work.

It can be a feature of an ADHD brain: many of us have never been very good at putting plates down. We keep adding more and more, with the only real boundaries being the ones we eventually find by reaching the limit of capacity, then starting to drop things and hearing them smash.

A chance to do some weeding

There does seem to be something about midlife. The challenge of this period can act as a reconfiguration: neurochemical shifts may create necessary space to look at the roles, responsibilities, habits and patterns carried for years, and then ask whether we still want all of them.

Just for now, I’m rather enjoying only having myself to think about.