In parts 1 and 2 I wrote about how we can work to be more successful at the things that are most important to us by framing it as a decision to fail at things that are less important to us (and perhaps only important to the people around us). However, there is still the case where we’ve cut out the unimportant or wasteful stuff as well as the activities we were just doing to meet others’ expectations and yet still feel like there isn’t enough time. In this case, we feel forced to either give inadequate effort to everything we do or completely remove something important from our lives.

I’ve had some seasons where I felt this way (along with seasons where I had to cut out a lot of waste and seasons where I had to stop caring so much about others’ expectations). At this point, I have just a couple things that I remind myself of to make the situation easier to manage.

Resist the tendency to do each thing a little bit every week. That seems to be the default way that we manage multiple activities: keep everything fresh in our minds by starting and stopping every activity in a short timespan. In my experience, I do this more as a quick reaction to anxieties (“I haven’t worked on X in 3 days! I need to put in 30 minutes right now!”) rather than any kind of planned strategy. In this case, planning works better.

Here’s why doing “a little bit of everything” in a short amount of time doesn’t work. If I were to spend an hour a week practicing drums, an hour working out, 2 hours working on a coding project, 2 hours making 3d art, and another hour reading a book, every week, I’d make very little progress in all of these areas. Throughout each week, I’d have to deal with the “overhead costs” of every activity: 

• recovering rusty muscle memory on the drums; 
• taking it easy on my workout so I don’t hurt myself after my body’s been idle for a week; 
• taking the time to give myself an overview of the whole coding project, reminding myself of the vision for the final product, finding where I had stopped, and figuring out which area to work on next (same goes for 3d projects);
• reading backward into a book to remind myself of the context where I left off;

If I decide instead to spend 7 hours a week doing any one of those things, and change it up each week, then I only have to deal with one “overhead cost” per week. This means, generally, people do more effective work when they can focus on one thing for longer periods of time. Unfortunately, this gets messier in practice; it’s never as simple as doing one thing at a time, and changing it up every week (or month, 6 months, etc.).

It gets complicated because each task has a different rhythm. Every activity I employ myself with requires a different length of time to make real progress and can tolerate a different length of time with no progress. 

For example, when reading a book, I might be able to finish it in a 2-week “sprint.” Even better, finishing a book is a very clear “checkpoint”. Once you finish a book, you can take a break for as long as you want, and it won’t be any harder to start a new book when you want to. Books are flexible to plan out. 

With a coding project, on the other hand, the real checkpoint (finishing the project) will probably take many weeks, but I set artificial checkpoints throughout (like if I work on some feature for 2 weeks, and then that feature is complete and done with). I can take as long as I want between projects, but in between parts of a project, if I take more than a couple weeks off I’ll start to forget too many of the details. Coding projects are a little less flexible.

With physical fitness, there are no real checkpoints. Some level of consistency is always required to maintain a certain level of fitness. If I take more than a week off from workouts, it’ll take some time to just get back to where I was before. And when I want to make real progress, it generally requires a consistent, focused effort for several weeks straight. Fitness is the least flexible thing I try to fit into my schedule.

Since each task has a different rhythm, it’s hard to fit them into a simple structure like, “Work on X for 4 weeks, work on Y for 4 weeks, work on Z for 4 weeks, and repeat.” Instead, I often have sprints of different lengths and overlapping sprints with varying degrees of focus from week to week. 

MAIN POINT

The main thing I want to say here is that the ideal way to manage a lot of tasks is not to give them all equal effort every week, nor is it to do only one task at a time for long periods. The best system seems to be somewhere in between, mapping tasks to different periods of sprints and suspensions according to their own unique rhythms, and fitting all of these together as best we can.

It’s vague, and it’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s the system that works for me. Ultimately it’s still not easy to be a generalist, but hopefully I’ve addressed some common mistakes that people make when they try to do many different things with limited time. 

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