Joshua O • May 22, 2022 • 9 min read • 1,634 words
I feel all thin, sort of stretched … like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can’t be right. I need a change, or something.
I relate so much to this quote which I found in an unexpected place 🧙♂️. When other contexts speak to you about unrelated aspects of your life, it's usually a sign that something has more weight than you realize.
On that note, I’ve come to a realization:
Doing too much at once dilutes the quality of the whole. You can’t give anything everything you got, and so each piece chips away at you. When you divide your attention, so are you divided.
I can tell you a story about a guy who wanted it all. He wanted to be an artist, a game developer, wanted to learn Chinese, German, even Latin, learn to play the piano, the guitar, beat-making, music theory, become a software engineer, have his own software company, become a writer, and write about software, but also fiction, and turn that fiction into audio-books, perhaps a Netflix show, and, of couse, to have a YouTube channel for each discrete project.
Exhausting sentence to read, isn't it? Well, now imagine you’re this person—You have to work on all these things in a day, or a week, or, let's be generous, even a month. How would you go about organizing your schedule so that you can work on all these things and still have time to live?
You don’t need to have as many ambitions or projects to overwhelm yourself. Two or three projects wanting your attention each day can affect you in ways you may not notice in the short term.
When you divide your attention, so are you divided.
Now add to that schedule the fact that you’re surrounded by gadgets of all kinds. Computers, games, TV, books, social networks, friendships, gossip, infinite scrolling. To each their own list of mathoms. All these things wanting a chunk of your attention, making you feel guilty for not using/doing them, and them making you feel guilty when you use/do them because you’re not doing any of the things you said you would do. When you practice piano, you think you're missing out on Chinese. When you write about web servers, you think you're putting off writing that book.
It doesn’t take too much to notice that this creates a recursive cycle. You have too much to do, and you have too much stuff that demands your attention and stops you from doing what you have to do. In a system with finite time and energy, as the one I’m sitting on as I write this—salutations to any extra-dimensional beings reading this 🖖—there’s only so much you can accomplish before you're done, for the day or your days.
With limited time, any amount you spend on any single thing will feel as if it’s sucking time away from the others. As you run out of time, no one thing will be worth your time more than any other you may be doing in its stead. You’ll distract yourself from the task at hand with thoughts of the task to come, absent in the moment. The things you do may start to show a distinct lack of you. Cookie cutter efforts.
This leads to, in my mind, an obvious conclusion; you can't escape this cycle as long as the number of things you must do and the things that want doing stays the same. It’s one of those obnoxious, axiomatic constants that aren’t helpful to think about, so we often avoid them. That is to say, we avoid accepting reality because it doesn’t conform with the current thread we’re trying to weave.
As time goes by, you may begin to feel dwindled, as if nothing makes sense or satisfies you. As a defense mechanism against the never-ending context switching, your brain bars off your actions from your feelings. It won’t do to feel as excited about something you can’t dedicate the energy that excitement produces, so you shut off your ability to appreciate what you do, just to stay sane.
I’m not going to tell you the solution is to become a minimalist, to throw all your stuff away, keeping the essential. Or to give up on all your dreams and settle for whatever has the best return. I often remind myself of the middle way, which Buddha taught, but we all know instinctively. Extremes shouldn't be the first or even tenth measure you take. Cold turkey fluctuations in your routine will shock you into paralysis. You’ll miss and hurt too much to stay away from it all at once, and you’ll relapse effortlessly.
I’m not even going to tell you to stop this or that thing you’re doing that may be slowing you down. That is for you to decide when the time comes for you to face the truth AND take action. What I am going to tell you is that something's gotta give.
Do one thing only, all the way down to the smallest details.
Focus on one project until you see it to completion, but also focus on doing one thing at a time, all the time. Give up the myth of multitasking which is no more than a trap to convince workers they should admire spreading themselves thin over too much work. Don't think or sing of yourself as a workaholic, remember the word it comes from, it's not supposed to be positive, and those that know, know you don't.
Do yourself a favor now for which your future self will thank you. Do one thing only, as long and as much as you have the privilege to do so.
When you do one thing, you can give your all. Your work will have that much more of you, and that much more quality, because you take advantage of your full potential and faculties.
You are also able to think more clearly, and spaciously. You come up with ideas and solutions that you wouldn't have if you otherwise tried to do too much. You boost your creativity in the relaxed state that doing just one thing enables.
Perhaps best of all, you may come to realize, is the fact that you will have more time to be yourself. Who you are is the source of all the great things you're able to do.
If your goal is to go to the Moon, map out your path from this moment to your landing on the Moon. Describe each step you must take to get there, linking each step to the next with clear and reasonable justification. Don't say you need to learn the names of every crater on the Moon because it's great adjacent knowledge to start off conversations with your fellow Astronauts; justify your crater project with a measurable result that opens the door for the next.
Once you have that roadmap, stick to it. Rather than hopping from rabbit hole to rabbit hole, remember the Moon is up, not down. Push yourself to keep climbing up to it.
Periodically review your plans, reflect on what you’ve done well, and what you can improve. Learn from successes and failures, but opt to fail early. Make necessary changes that won’t throw you off the path.
Recently, I've been committed to doing one thing only, but I realized that just saying it isn't enough. It is important to repeat ths to myself so it gets ingrained in my unconscious actions, but it's equally important to be intentional about the way I approach this.
An initial attempt I've been trying is to set myself long term goals, divide them into medium term, and those into short to immediate term goals and tasks.
I'm still in the early stages of developing a personal framework to prioritize my projects. I'm splitting them into categories, health, social, professional, creative, and focusing on one or two categories for 3 to 6 months.
Along a professional goal, which I may talk about in a future post, I picked up something relatively simple that will also make it easier for me to improve in other areas; a regular sleep schedule and exercise.
Since modifying habits often proves a hard endeavor, rather than trying to sleep and exercise in my ideal level from the start, I'm doing it gradually, and I'm not moving from one stage to another until the stage I'm at feels like a breeze.
Here's a template I've been working on to help me prioritize this goal, it is rough around the edges, but should give you an idea of how you could divide your goals. (I will likely turn this into a format that makes more sense, maybe a PDF or spreadsheet that is easily duplicated for reuse).
In the template, there are timelines I chose for myself. Note that your definition of long term, medium term, and short term may vary, use the words and timelines you feel comfortable with.
Remember, give yourself time to be human. Time to worry not about the things with contextual meaning, time to recharge among the things that make you happy and have universal meaning. Sharpen that axe!
Do one thing only, as long and as much as you have the privilege to do so.
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