When I was shooting film, I don’t remember self portraits being this difficult to do. I’ve been doing a round of self portraits lately, where I’m juggling and then taking the picture. The difficult thing is my need to tweak settings after each shot.
I guess that’s the whole point of the exercise though.  I’m getting a little bit better at looking at the lighting conditions and then making a judgment about aperture and shutter speed. Ideally, I’d have the laptop out there connected to the camera so that I could see results right away, but that’s too much equipment so I eyeball it most of the time on the small screen.
I guess juggling isn’t really a good summary type activity for self portraits, although it does give me a chance to look like I’m focusing on not dropping things.