What do you do when you have so many interests you don’t know where to begin? You want to pursue them all, but you find yourself being pulled in a dozen different directions and you’re just not getting anything done.
In her book, Refuse to Choose, author and career coach Barbara Sher notes that trying to decide which of your interests to pursue is like trying to decide which of your children to feed.
True, but there’s a difference between feeding your children and turning them into screaming, demanding, merciless little three-horned monsters. And when it comes to our interests, I think we often do the latter, because we have a tendency to turn every interest into a project. Then one day we wake up and discover we have three dozen projects, a throbbing headache, and a giant, scarlet L tattooed on our chest.
We’re kind of like Wile E. Coyote plotting a batch of schemes to capture the road runner, only we’re trying to catch an entire flock. In our minds, we’re going to become ninja like project managers, part productivity experts, part zen warriors, part circus jugglers.
It’s not enough to explore the joys of drawing. We have to implement a drawing program. We don’t just read up on something that’s grabbed our attention. We go into full-blown research mode. We stack project on top of project and when they start tumbling down, we wonder why.
But returning to the idea of interests being like offspring, anyone who’s raised children knows it’s not unusual for one of them to need more attention than the others at any given moment. They scrape their knee, they have a big test coming up, they’re going through puberty.
Your interests are no different. It’s very likely, for the time being, that one of them needs more attention than the rest. It’s the one standing by your side, tugging on your shirt sleeve, and asking for your help with an important project. In my case, it’s the one asking me to write a book.
The rest of your interests may not need that much attention. They might be perfectly satisfied with an occasional trip to the playground.
The way I’ve come to handle this is to choose one big, hairy project and work on it first thing every day. That’s how I’m writing my book.
And I’m still entertaining my other interests; they’re the rewards for a morning well spent, but when I’m spending time with them, I ditch the project mindset. We’re just hanging out together, horsing around, having fun.
I guess I’m a one-big-project-at-a-time kind of guy. Anytime I forget this, things seem to unravel.
I don’t know how many projects you can juggle, but I’d suggest trying to focus on the most important one for a period each day, downsizing the others until the big one’s finished, and ditching the project mindset altogether for your interests that don’t really require it.
Instead of constantly being in project mode, take a trip now and then to the playground. I hear the monkey bars are fun.
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