A friend trapped in his own tumultuous schedule recently reached out to ask how I seemingly effortlessly manage my bandwidth. For starters, I try, but even I get swamped. And I’m sure people I’ve worked with closely can corroborate. So if anyone has a better way, I’m all ears.
That said, as I mentioned, I do try. And naturally, that means I think about balancing my plate a lot. From shower thoughts to systems to keep me accountable. I’m going to share below the four things I shared with him, in hopes you’ll find some use for your own life here.
- I have a whiteboard in my shower. (Although, you might remember I mentioned this before.) In a list format in the top right corner of the board, I write down everything I’m involved in, especially the ones that require my attention. This way, everything is always floating around somewhere in the back of head. And when I shower, I take the one I’m most excited about ideating and just let the kids run wild in the attic.
- I like asking myself the question: What would I do if I knew I would fail? And subsequently… what skills, relationships, and experiences can I gain that would transcend the outcome of the project itself? With those two questions, it helps to take the emotion out of the equation and consider it rationally. Which helps in arriving at a decision that I won’t regret. And naturally since I have a pretty high bar with what I choose to embark on, that does mean I say no to a lot of things.
- Work with people who are as passionate or more passionate than you are about the project or subject matter. You also want to work with people whose passion is independent of yours. For instance, if they’re only doing a project ’cause you’re excited about it, the lack of internal motivation, I’ve found, to be draining over time when I work with someone who isn’t intrinsically motivated to put in their all. It also ensures that if on an odd day out, I’m just 30% as motivated as I am usually, they come in with at least 70% of their motivation. And as long as the collective motivation at any given point in time is greater than 100%, we keep working on it.
- Lastly, I categorize activities and projects by how often something requires my attention. Some things require my attention daily. Others weekly. A handful of others biweekly. Or monthly. Or quarterly. A few annually (like taxes, ughhh). And at any given point in time, I will have no more than two items/projects per bucket. For instance, I will have no more than two pressing things that require my attention daily. And so yes, I’m context switching. But not nearly as much as one might think. The caveat is that when an activity becomes muscle memory and requires very little thinking to execute (i.e. exercise, brushing your teeth, showering, journaling, or so on for me), then that activity/project no longer counts toward its respective bucket.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
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