I never learned how to subtract.
At 8 years old, I was happily mastering addition (and the fine art of meowing in music class for attention) in Michigan—until my family moved to Pennsylvania. When I arrived in my second-grade class, I was surprised to see they had blown past addition and subtraction and straight into “Mad Minutes” of multiplication.
Times tables? No problem. Division? Got it. But subtraction? I never learned it, so I never built up the muscle memory. For years, I relied on the “count-on-your-fingers” method. (Yikes.)
I tried to play it cool, but let’s be honest: I could not subtract.
Looking back, it’s funny: In a world of surplus, I never learned the value of taking things away. Where my peers made “either/or” choices, I lived in a world of “and” and “more.” Band or chorus? I couldn’t stomach subtracting one, so I did both—on alternating days.
This “why not both?” instinct followed me into adulthood and my career, where I (still) insist on intersections over simplifications. I’ve heard it all: You do too much. You can’t commit. You’re unfocused.
But over time, I realized that always choosing “both” wasn’t necessarily a flaw—at least not in all contexts. Choosing a curiosity-driven career essentially meant opting for a different operating system. Instead of struggling to subtract, I needed a work structure that embraced addition. Enter fractional work.
Tuning Your Radar to the Additive Power of Fractional Work
Fractional work is a powerful way to test and expand your personal capacity to add more. Juggling multiple projects (much like juggling multiple children) is an excellent forcing function to really understand the limits of your bandwidth and the unique boundaries of your throughput.
After four years of diving in and out of projects—like a gannet plunging underwater for a deep sea catch—I’ve learned how to extend that capacity even further.
Consider these key project factors when structuring your portfolio.
Fractional Work Project Factors
Each project you take on has a particular cadence and load that's required for it to succeed. Understanding the balance of how all of your projects work together (and mapping that against your own peak productivity) will help you increase your own capacity and throughput.
Four factors to consider are:
Stage:
What is the phase of work required for this project? Is it in “startup mode” where intense, creative energy is needed, or in “maintenance mode” where ongoing, routine tasks are required?Sequencing:
How does the timing and phase of any new project layer into your existing work? Does it complement or conflict with your other project sequencing needs?Tempo:
What is the speed and rhythm that other project team members get work done? Does their pace align with your own workflow, and as it relates to other projects in your portfolio?Load:
What type of bandwidth or activation energy do you need to unleash in order to accomplish this project? Can it be integrated smoothly into your current workload, or does it risk overwhelming your capacity? Even more deeply, how does your bandwidth type required on any given project complement the rest of your energetic output (including at home, with your friends and family, or on other side quests like working out or daily writing habits)?
Through trial and error, I’ve learned a few key things about how I work best. For instance:
I can carry more projects in maintenance mode than in startup mode.
I always want at least one project in startup mode at a time.
I can’t have more than one project in startup mode and expect both to succeed.
If I’m launching a startup-mode project for a client, I can’t also be in startup mode on a personal project.
When you map things out like this, finding the ideal balance in your work portfolio starts to look a lot less like an existential crisis and a lot more like a word problem...
A Class Word Problem:
Janie is taller than Jack.
Jack is shorter than Jill.
Jill is not the tallest.
Who is the tallest among them?
The AI of It All
Over the past few years, each new project cycle and sequence helped me incrementally improve my own optimization. But over the past year, my deep integration of AI into my workflow has exponentially increased my throughput.
For the first time in my life, I was (finally) able to get ahead of my own ambition and close many open loops across multiple projects at once.
In a world of anything-is-possible, smash-it-all-together possibilities, my addition and multiplication skills have never been more useful. The counterintuitive way I’m increasing my capacity isn’t by asking AI to help me subtract or do less—it’s by throwing all the fragmented, anti-patterned pieces of my brain at it at once.
AI acts like a rock tumbler, refining those complex, spiky ideas into something smoother and more cohesive on the other side. Lucky for me, working with AI doesn’t start with subtraction—it starts with addition and multiplication. And when you do it right, subtraction takes care of itself. Which means...you can move straight to division.
