human multi-tenancy
In 2022 I coined hyper multitasking and left it at one line. Let me try again with a better word.
Software has a term for one system serving many customers at once, each believing it has the machine to itself: multi-tenancy. It’s how every SaaS product you use is built, and it’s the architecture Salesforce spent the 2000s explaining to anyone who’d listen. The tenants share the hardware and never see each other, because the platform does three things on their behalf. It isolates them, so one tenant’s mess stays in its own rows. It schedules them, so nobody starves. And it keeps a view above all of them, the operator’s console, where someone can see every tenant’s state without being inside any one of them.
You are a multi-tenant system. Your employer is one organization on it. Each customer is another. Your household is the one with the most senior account. The side project, the volunteer thing, the body that needs to see a dentist: all organizations, all sharing you. Each has its own people, vocabulary, credentials, open items and pace. Each believes it has you to itself.
The difference between you and the platform is that you were never given the three things. No isolation: organization B’s chat sits one tab from organization A’s, and both drain into one inbox. No scheduler: whichever organization is loudest runs. And no console. There is no surface that sits above all of your organizations and belongs to none of them, where you can see what every organization needs before you decide which one gets you.
Every tool you own is built for one organization. It assumes it is the org. Log in and you’re inside it. Log out and it forgets you were ever anywhere else.
So the isolation gets done with browser profiles and colored terminals. The scheduling gets done by whoever pinged last. And the console is your memory, which, per the last post, is accruing interest on every organization you’re not looking at.
I’m going to call this the multi-organization problem. The rest of this series is about what it would take to give the human the three things the platform got.
Multi-tenancy was solved for machines two decades ago. For the people running them, it’s still a spreadsheet and a good memory.