I’ve been working hard on my juggling (actual juggling, not metaphorical juggling).
The secret, as I wrote about in The Practice is the throwing, not the catching. If you get the throws right, the catches are easy.
The way to focus on the throws is simple but culturally difficult: Errant throws don’t earn a lunge.
Let them drop.
Simply stand there and watch them drop.
Realize that the problem isn’t that you didn’t lunge. The problem was that your throws were off.
It’s hard to do this at work (here’s the metaphor part). There are lots of rewards for heroic saves at work. But heroic saves undermine the desire to build better systems.
If it’s worth having a better system, it might be worth shutting down the entire plant when the system breaks.