So I habitually bite off more than I can chew: at any given time I have 200 to 250 projects running, and no reasonable human being can keep on top of more than seven plus or minus two things at once.
Now, I know, I know, I know, I’m likely autistic, and am prompted to be WAY more explicit than most people about the projects that I’m ACTUALLY doing, whereas most people just fool themselves into thinking they’re doing a few things when in reality they’re relying on their well-trained autonomic adulting skills to keep on top of the dozens upon dozens of things they need to do to keep on top of just living. But, beyond, that, I have hundreds of creative projects that I want to tackle, so many that I often feel like I’m thrashing.
But if you focus – again, I know, I know, I know, I say I hate focus, and that focus is the enemy, but bear with me for a bit – I say, if you allow yourself to be creative, and imagine ALL the things you might be doing … BUT then focus on a few of them at once, trying to make sure you make progress on just those, you can, step by step, move your way through those projects, get them done, and move on to the next ones.
I’ve been “reading and eating” for decades now as my way of consuming material, but only recently have I started using the “ten page rule,” in which I break each chapter into ten page sections, and try to make sure I get through at least 5 pages of a section in each reading session (the whole ten, or to end of chapter, if the material is easy, or the book’s pages are small, or the chapters are short; the five page grace period if it’s a big fat textbook filled with details with which I am unfamiliar). But I’ve augmented that now – by focusing on the most important books first, promising myself I can read the others if I get through them. I’m almost done with Large Language Models: A Deep Dive, which has been very illuminating.
And now I’ve built on that, so at the end of the day, after reading my “chunk of the hard book at night with milk and pound cake” – which is usually a big fat textbook that requires reading and re-reading of sections over and over again until I get it – I say, after that, I pick up a by-the-bedstand novel and read a chapter. Just one chapter (again, less if it is big long fat chapters or something esoteric). I’ve gotten through The Cthulhu Casebook: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows and Cthulhu Passant that way and am now digging deeper into my novel backlog, promising myself I can by more books as I finish them.
The same thing has been going on with various of my research projects: I have been building out various pieces of software, sometimes with a lot of thrashing. But I stuck with a project I had been tempted to abandon, and today got it mostly working, all unit tests passing, all code checked in and pushed to Github. I still have more features I want to add before release … but it felt good.
While I don’t believe in “focus” for focus’s sake, I do believe focus is a tool you can use effectively. And if you prioritize your highest-value, lowest-remaining-work projects, and focus on getting done the next thing you have to do, you can, over time, walk that path that starts with a single step, and find yourself a thousand miles later standing atop your mountain.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Eating, and reading, at Panera.
