Nine directories, nine branches, nine terminals if I wanted them. I opened three and finished none.
The setup that was supposed to fix everything
The system had nine modules and every one of them was broken in some way. Fixing them one after another felt like watching paint dry, so I did the tidy thing: one feature branch per module, one worktree per branch, nine directories sitting side by side.
The reasoning was sound. Each directory is independent, each commit lands on its own branch, nothing waits on anything else. Nine problems, nine lanes, all moving.
Nine lanes, one pair of hands
Here is what actually happened. I opened three terminals, then a fourth. Each worktree looked exactly like the last one from the outside — same files, same layout, different folder name — and my brain kept reloading context on every switch.
I would fix a strategy bug, jump to the trade module, forget why I was there, come back and re-read what I had just written. The setup multiplied the rooms. It did not multiply the person standing in them.
The guardrail I did not expect to like
The tool has one hard rule: the same branch cannot be checked out in two worktrees at once. It exists for a mechanical reason, but it reads like something else entirely. You cannot be in two places. The system will not let you pretend.
That is the whole design of a focus timer too. Nine timers running at once would be nine timers doing nothing. One bottle, one block, one light that dims when you look away.
One room at a time
The shared file is where the illusion breaks. Two modules that both touch the same router will still collide at merge time, no matter how cleanly the directories were separated. Parallel work has a seam, and the seam is real.
So I kept the nine worktrees — they are genuinely useful — and changed one habit. One terminal, one room, fifty minutes, then merge and move on. The light in the bottle does not care how many branches exist. It only knows whether you are still there.