Divide and Conquer

I’ve made some progress regarding the number of projects I’m balancing, but it has been difficult. Ultimately, I had to sit down and list the things I’m doing before prioritizing them.

It’s not as if I hadn’t already done this: in fact, I live by lists and time lines and schedules; however, things were a bit different this time.

This time, I made my list, set my priorities, and then—oh god—then, I built my schedule for the next three weeks around working on only the top two priorities. (This means I’m currently pretending the other five super-important, really-beneficial, totally-interesting projects do not exist.)

Generally, I consider all of the top-priority things I have to do and spread my time evenly among them, but lately, this has created some significant mental chaos as I grind slowly through so many things I feel as if I’m running through mud.

So, I made up my mind: the top two things get my attention and damn the rest for now.

Talk about frustrating: I was in a constant struggle with my brain over the other things until I bought myself a tiny notebook into which I have given myself permission to jot down the things that are busily throwing themselves at me about all of the abandoned projects—abandoned is their word not mine—the result was a lot of distracting note taking at first, but for the last day or so, my brain has given me a break and allowed me to focus on the only two projects that currently exist in my world.