Do you ever get hat hair? You know, what happens when you’ve been wearing a hat or visor and you take it off and your hair is all dented and messed up?
I get hat brain. It comes from having to change hats so often during the work day. Designer hat. Project manager hat. CEO hat. Coder hat. Community member hat. Marketer hat. So many hats! And I have to wear many of them each and every day. And that’s hard. It’s especially hard when jumping from a designer or coder hat, where I’m deep in flow puzzling out something, experimenting, totally immersed, to a project manager or CEO hat, where I’m stepping back, looking at the big picture, strategy stuff, people interactions. Each hat leaves dents in my brain. It takes a few minutes to let the dents fade, a few minutes before I can realistically and effectively wear a different hat. Right now I see timeboxing as an answer. I’m tempted to write a quick app to facilitate it, since I haven’t seen anything too useful so far. But of course that would require changing hats.