I'm doing too many things

Projects, Life-lessons, Habits, Motivation · 
5 mins read

In the last few years, I’ve been carrying out so many activities.

Here are the most important ones:

  1. Studying
  2. Web development
  3. Video games development
  4. Android app development
  5. 3D modeling & Art
  6. Video editing
  7. Music Production
  8. Writing essays and tutorials

It surely is a lot. Right now, I could be defined as a student, a programmer, an artist, a musician, and a writer all at the same time.

But if this sounds impossible, that’s because it is.

While I’m glad to frequently have the desire to put myself to work and make or do something relevant (a rare phenomenon for many people), I still have a problem distributing this energy properly.

When you try to do something by only exploiting bursts of willpower and determination instead of forming a habit, you’ll almost always come back empty-handed from what you were trying to achieve.

Habits vs Motivation chart Motivation 🆚 habits. You don’t get results with motivation alone.

I can put all of myself into what I’m interested in, but most of the time, I quickly end up exhausted or distracted by something else.

The reality is that time is finite, and motivation is even more so. Oftentimes, the more time passes, the less motivation you have.

This is especially evident when I work on a lot of separate projects in parallel. It is advantageous to avoid monotony, but it also makes it easier to lose interest, discipline, and momentum, at least in my case. For example, when I switch from one to the other I have to readapt to the workflow every time and that’s not very efficient.

Maybe the problem is my excessively broad range of interests. I’m constantly reminded that in order to focus you must inevitably say “No” to most other things.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” – Steve Jobs

The problem I have with this approach is that I simply cannot refuse to explore all those things. Why? It’s hard to explain, but I try my best:

  1. Limiting myself to only a few choices would become monotonous and frustrating, and I would probably become very stressed if I did that thing for too long;
  2. I’m afraid that being very good at doing only one specific activity would make me vulnerable if that thing is no longer needed in the world, either because it’s been automated or for other reasons;
  3. In general, I’m a very curious person, therefore I can’t give up on everything I’m doing, even if I’m aware that it’s impossible to complete all my projects.

You’d rightly argue that’s better to complete one project instead of starting 100 others and never finishing them. I agree.

I also know that doing so many disparate things prevents you from being an expert at them all to the point where I would honestly acknowledge that I’m not very good at any of the activities I listed above. Maybe, in that case, it’s better to be able to do just one thing but well.

What else can I do to solve this?

I’m young and I’m still exploring my capabilities and the possibilities I have ahead of me. I’m not ready at all to make a definitive choice.

Not that I’m being asked to do that, but that’s kind of what the society wants. It’s what I should have to do if I wanted to become good at something and be successful.

A potential solution would be to change the scope of my projects and lower my ambitions. Since I still have to learn a lot before being capable of managing more complex projects and activities, that would be a reasonable thing to do, but it wouldn’t be 100% painless.

I will describe the projects I’m talking about in the upcoming end-of-the-year post, but in short, there’s a reason if I don’t do simple and easy projects: they are trivial and unoriginal (especially for games, videos, and music). If I spend a lot of time on a project, it has to be a relevant one, or I rather do something else entirely. While perfect is the enemy of good, I’d avoid accepting bad outcomes just to excuse the effort spent to achieve them.

I don’t really know how to end this post, and I still haven’t found a satisfying solution to my problem. I might update the post if I find it, but in the meantime, I hope sharing this feeling of mine could be helpful to other people too.

Post thumbnail generated by DALL·E 2 and edited with GIMP.

Update

In his latest newsletter, James Clear shared an interesting thought about this exact problem of mine:

“Curiosity can empower you or impede you. Being curious and focused is a powerful combination. I define this combination as unleashing your curiosity within the domain of a particular task: asking questions about how things work, exploring different lines of attack for solving the problem, reading ideas from outside domains while always looking for ways to transfer the knowledge back to your main task, and so on. Even though you’re exploring widely, you’re generally moving the ball forward on the main thing. You start something and you keep searching until you find an effective way to finish it.

Meanwhile, when your curiosity sends you off in a dozen different directions and fractures your attention, then it can prevent you from focusing on one thing long enough to see it through to completion. Curious, but unfocused. You’re jumping from one topic to the next, they aren’t necessarily related, your efforts don’t accumulate, you’re simply exploring. You start many things and finish few.

How is your curiosity being directed? Is it rocket fuel or a roadblock?” – James Clear

With this in mind, the best solution is probably to keep a balance between task-specific curiosity and general curiosity, since both are necessary. In that way, you can both complete your projects and discover/learn from the world around you.

That’s what I will try to do from now on.


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