20 Lessons from 20 Years: Why Stacking Tasks Is the Better Way to Multitask
One morning I was sitting at my desk before sunrise, coffee already cold, with a tab-castrophe on my browser, Slack buzzing, and I was answering emails while half-watching stats refresh and probably thinking about whatever meeting I had later that day (I hate calls). By noon, I felt like nothing meaningful had moved forward. I had been busy, constantly busy, yet felt strangely ineffective. That morning wasn’t unusual back then. It was just the price I thought you paid for “doing it all.”
In the early years of JuicyAds, I worked the 16-hour days and wore that like a badge of honor. All of the success of those early years was off the back of long-hours of a single developer, sales rep, and support manager — they were all me. If I wasn’t also juggling multiple campaigns, conversations, and crises at once, I felt like I was falling behind. Multitasking was seen as a strength, especially in fast-moving businesses where traffic, payouts, and partners could shift overnight. The problem was that the more I tried to do at the same time, the less I felt I was getting done.
It took me years to realize that what most of us call multitasking isn’t a productivity skill at all. It’s attention fragmentation. When two things compete for the same mental bandwidth, one of them always loses, and usually it’s the thing that actually makes money. In advertising, that shows up as late reactions to low converting traffic, slow optimization cycles, and decisions made emotionally because you’re tired, not because the data supports them. I’ve lived it like many others.
Somewhere along the way, I started noticing a different pattern in the days that actually felt successful. Not the days where I checked the most boxes, but the ones where progress happened quietly in the background while I focused on something else. I’d launch a campaign in the morning, put a rule set in place, and then leave it alone while I worked on a partnership or product issue. By the time I circled back, the campaign was cleaner, tighter, and already improving. That wasn’t multitasking in the classic sense. It was something else entirely.
That’s where the idea of “stacking tasks” really clicked for me. Stacking isn’t about splitting your attention; it’s about aligning tasks that don’t compete with each other. It’s the difference between trying to read a book while answering emails versus starting the laundry before you sit down to read. One requires nothing from you once it’s in motion. The other demands constant context switching. In business, especially in advertising, that distinction matters more than most people realize.
Affiliate marketing and media buying reward focus, but they also punish idleness. Campaigns don’t pause just because you’re in a meeting or asleep. Early on, disciplined self-service clients at JuicyAds would spend endless hours manually blocking placements, tweaking bids, and chasing marginal gains. Our fully managed campaigns weren’t much different on our side. They worked, but they required sustained, human attention. The better the operator, the more time they poured in. That model doesn’t scale without burning someone out, and usually it’s the founder or the best media buyer who pays that price.
Back in 2013, we made a decision that, at the time, didn’t feel innovative so much as necessary. We built the first real auto-optimization layer in the adult advertising space, what eventually became Adsistant at JuicyAds. It wasn’t positioned as a convenience feature or a growth hack. It was survival engineering. Before that, we had already rolled out rules-based auto-blocking, because we were watching the same pattern repeat itself over and over: smart, disciplined media buyers burning themselves out doing the same mechanical decisions every single night. The logic was brutally simple. If the system can make the exact same call you would make at three in the morning, then there’s no rational reason for you to be awake at three in the morning making it.
Years later, competitors would talk loudly about automation as if it had just been invented, but this shift happened long before it was fashionable, and more than five years before anyone else in our space caught up. It didn’t come from trend-watching or marketing theory. It came from watching talented operators babysit campaigns when they should have been stacking their time, their focus, and their energy somewhere that actually compounded. As postback technology matured, that philosophy only deepened. Rules stopped living inside individual campaigns and started operating across entire accounts, executing continuously, quietly, and without ego. That’s not multitasking. That’s building systems that work while you don’t.
As server-to-server postbacks matured, that philosophy expanded. Rules could now act across campaigns, not just within them. You could define your tolerances once and let the system enforce them continuously. That’s not multitasking. That’s stacking. While one system watches conversion quality and blocks underperformers, you can work on strategy, partnerships, or even step away entirely. The tasks run concurrently without competing for your attention, and that’s where real leverage appears.
Team-building fits into this same pattern. Delegation isn’t about doing less; it’s about allowing more to happen at once without diluting focus. When you trust a capable team or a well-designed system, work continues even when you’re not directly involved. That’s the ultimate form of stacking. It’s also uncomfortable, because it forces you to give up the illusion of control that comes from touching everything yourself. I’ve had to learn that lesson more than once.
There’s a lot of mythology around sacrifice in entrepreneurship. I used to talk about work-life balance as if it were something you could fine-tune with discipline. Over time, I’ve come to agree with people like Martha Stewart, who bluntly says it’s impossible. The boundary isn’t real. Work bleeds into life and life bleeds into work whether you like it or not. What you can control is whether your days feel like constant conflict or intentional flow.
I’ve seen the chart floating around social media that says you can only pick three things to care about: work, sleep, family, fitness, friends. I understand the sentiment, but I don’t fully accept the premise. If you approach everything as competing demands on your attention, then yes, something has to give. But when you start stacking instead of juggling, the math changes. Systems work while you rest. People you’ve empowered make progress while you’re present somewhere else. Campaigns improve without your hand on the wheel every minute.
Stacking tasks doesn’t mean doing everything. It means being honest about what requires your direct attention and what doesn’t. It means accepting that some things will move slower so that the right things can move at all. In advertising, that often means letting automation handle the boring, repeatable decisions so humans can focus on judgment, creativity, and long-term thinking. It also means acknowledging that control isn’t about constant intervention; it’s about designing the conditions where good outcomes happen without you.
I still have days where I catch myself slipping back into old habits, trying to respond to everything in real time, mistaking urgency for importance. When that happens, performance usually suffers, and so does everything else. The days that feel right are the ones where tasks are layered intentionally, where progress happens in parallel, and where attention is treated as the scarce resource it actually is.
Multitasking, as most people practice it, is a bad word for a reason. Stacking tasks, done thoughtfully, is something else entirely. It’s quieter, less visible, and far more effective. Over the years, it’s become one of the few ways I’ve found to grow businesses, maintain control, and still enjoy the days as they pass. Not because everything is perfectly balanced, but because nothing is fighting for attention that doesn’t need it.
