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Project Balance - how many to juggle?

Page created: 2023-05-25 , updated: 2023-05-31

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The question: How many concurrent projects is the right amount for maximum personal satisfaction?

(As I described to a friend in email: "Basically, I’ve had some sort of weird 'idea brainstorming' explosion in the last 2-3 weeks which caused me to start at least another 5 projects…​I’m currently in the act of writing down some of those ideas and shelving them so I can get back to a sane number of concurrent tasks. In computer terms, I’ve 'spawned too many threads' and I’m 'swapping to disk'.")

I’m writing this card this morning because I just wrote down the clearly insane list of personal projects I actually worked on yesterday. (8 projects.)

I knew it was a lot, but I didn’t know it was this much it was this much until I wrote it down.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s also a second list with more projects that occupied my mind at least once yesterday. (5 projects.)

These aren’t things I’ve plucked from the "TODO" list in the notebook at my desk (there’s more ideas and half-starts documented there for when I "have some time"). No, these are things I actively thought about.

It’s sort of impressive, in the same way that steam locomotive boiler explosions are impressive.

My mind was just a mess by the end of the day and it was all a huge blur. Obviously it was way too much.

Where’s the balance?

Too much singular focus

So here’s what I’ve noticed: If I do just one thing all day, I do get a lot done, but:

  • It’s surprisingly unsatisfying.

  • It’s not as efficient as giving myself a break from that thing.

I really feel like my day has flown by when I do only one thing. I don’t like that. Doing a couple different types of activities makes the day feel so much longer and more satisfying.

Also, I’ve found that doing just one task is definitely not as efficient. I’m way more productive overall if I give myself a break and do something else. I’m a huge believer in the big intuitive leaps that come during walks, showers, and after a night’s sleep.

Too little focus

The problems with doing too many things in a day are amusingly identical:

  • Also unsatisfying.

  • Also not efficient.

It’s not hard to see why these are the case. I mean, that bonkers list from yesterday showed me why the whole thing was just a blur. I couldn’t even keep the list straight in my head; I had to replay the day on paper to even remember it all. And this was all crammed into the time outside of the day job, remember. So clearly my time was hugely fragmented and very little of it was mental down time.

Just right

I’ve had some fantastic days that felt long and good. Everybody’s mix is going to be different, but my best days seem to have:

  • Family activities.

  • At least one trip out of the house.

  • Substantial down time (reading being the most satisfying to me).

  • One artistic pursuit (drawing or painting).

  • One or two projects (typically programming or technical writing).

On a weekend, this is easily accomplished in terms of time distribution, but not as easy to reconcile with my inclination to keep doing whatever it is I’m doing. I really have to fight the desire to keep plowing forward on a project while I’m making progress.

Apparently there are people out there who don’t think like this and that sounds…​pretty relaxing.

Update: So how do we get this balance when there are too many concurrent projects? Move them to the project-pool!