How’d I get here?

A few years back after being laid off, I told myself I’d take six months off. I was burned out, feeling creatively stifled, and there were things I wanted to learn and explore that I’d put on the backburner. That six months turned into a year and a half (by choice) and it was one of the most enjoyable periods of my adult life. I wasn’t “working,” but I was certainly productive.

During this period, I was reminded of a concept my old colleague Joseph Kuefler (an amazing illustrator and children’s book author) shared with me. He called it “the year of doing.” He would choose one meaningful project a year and focus only on that. The result for him was his first published children’s book. I found this inspiring and made some attempts to kick start the practice for myself, but it just didn’t click. I would get bored and found it hard to stay motivated on a single project for that long.

Now, I’ve always been someone who juggles a lot of hobbies and projects. It’s no doubt a symptom of ADHD, but I also just love learning and building. Early on during this “sabbatical,” I would wake up and start working on whatever felt interesting. Sometimes it would be the same thing I’d been working on the day before, or the past week, or an entirely new project. As time went on I realized I was learning a lot, but not particularly focused. It was a lot of play time and I wasn’t making meaningful progress on the things I wanted to finish. After some reflection, taking the time to understand my motivations, and noting how I like to self-learn, I came up with a “framework” for myself.

The Framework

The goals were relatively simple:

  • Give myself room to work on multiple projects

  • Enable focused efforts on a single project

  • Take breaks to AVOID BURNING OUT

For some, you might just be able to keep those goals in the back of your mind and chug along, but I gave myself some rules:

  1. You’re allowed to work on no more than three projects (or domains) at a time. Anything else goes in the bucket of ideas until you’ve completed a project or decided it’s no longer worth completing.

  2. At the end of each week, decide which project you’re going to work on the following week. This can either be the same project or one of the other two.

  3. Decide what you want to accomplish that week. This could be one large goal or a few small goals.

  4. Work on the project at least once a day for any amount of time.

  5. If at any point during the week you want to work on something else, you either continue with your chosen project or take the rest of the week off from all projects.

Yeah, but why?

Rule #1 was the first thing I enacted. I have more ideas than time (or energy) so this kept me focused and helped me prioritize what mattered most. Sometimes I just wanted to learn something new and be competent at it, so some projects were just ‘learn XYZ’ without necessarily needing to build something to be presented to the world.

Rule #2 gave me permission to change gears, but only after I’d spent my effort that week. The weekly timeframe works because it provides focus time while still giving me the agency to switch to something else relatively soon.

Rule #3 ensured I didn’t sit down to start without knowing what I was going to work on. By doing this ahead of time, I had already prioritized for myself.

Rule #4 is really just the consistency principle. Spending five minutes on anything inevitably balloons into at least 10 or 20, but now there’s always forward progress.

Rule #5 ended up being one of the most important for me. I tend to hyperfocus on the new shiny idea, even in the middle of something else. It leads me to bounce around and regularly context switch which can feel productive, but ultimately slows everything down. And worse, after too many bouts of these hyperfocus periods, I’m drained, burned out, and don’t want to work on anything. So, if I really want to work on another project, I take that as my cue to take a break from everything.

The Results

After using this on and off for about three years now, I’ve finished more projects, written more apps, recorded more music, and learned more than I have in probably the last ten years.

That said, even with this small amount of structure, there are still periods where things go off the rails, but I’ve spent enough time in therapy to learn to give myself some grace and you should, too.