If I’m doing my math right, I turn 45 today, and this Patreon has been running for twelve months. It’s been an off-kilter, catch-as-catch-can kind of year, full of pivots and re-examination of what I can achieve, and I’m not sure that process is over yet. Life is chaotic right now, beyond the usual chaos of being two months out from running a major event.
On weeks like this, I fall back on Charlie Gilkie’s theory that we can progress/manage five active projects over the course of a week, and trying to stretch beyond that leads to diminishing returns and frustration.
If you’ve got any kind of perfectionist tendency, five sounds like a terrifying constraint, but it’s worse when you consider that Gilkie’s includes major personal goals or recurring commitments as a project.
Since how many projects we finish is more important than how many we start, we do ourselves no favors by committing to more projects than we’ll be able to do. In reality, three projects is a better limit for creative and/or professional projects because it leaves bandwidth to use for life/personal projects and accounts for the work we’re doing but not counting (Gilkey, Charlie. Start Finishing, p. 83).
The life/personal projects are the ones that sneak up on you. While I’m loathe to refer to my partner as a “project”, doing any kind of to-do list that ignores the fact that I live with and love someone with chronic pain conditions undersells the impact that has on my ability to get stuff done. There are days when they have to come first, or I need to pick up the slack on things they’re in too much pain to do, and failing to account for that will
This week’s also seen some big movement on the job-search front, so there’s been a fair amount of interview prep, plus time for anxiety and second-guess and quietly hoping that I won’t have to stay in the day job I’m really not enjoying (here, too, Gilkey’s framework provides an interesting insight on office stress levels — I’m trying to advance nine separate ‘urgent’ projects right now, including three that came back to bite us because they didn’t receive adequate attention before being declared ‘done’).
It’s interesting to think about this in relation to my March calendar, where I was carving out writing time fairly reliably after the despair of February (where the day job ate all 5 of my projects, then came back for seconds and thirds) right up until last Friday. I’ve been perplexed as to why I lost momentum, but looking at it with Gilkey’s five active projects in mind, I can see two clear points where the “spare” project I was using for writing and Patreoning got eaten up.
First, I spent Saturday putting together an application for the job I’ll be interviewing for after work today.
Second, my partner fell off a stool and hit their head pretty hard on the edge of the bed, which has taken them out of commission for much of the last week. This meant picking up a bunch of Brain Jar tasks they’d been handling/monitoring, while also supporting them and picking up some of the household chores.
An interesting thing I’ve noticed — I’m got a potential failure point baked into the calendar set-up at the moment, because I’m tracking three active projects (drafting, Patreon/Social engagement, Brain Jar Press work) as though I still have the capacity to progress all of them consistently. That’s a legacy of my pre-day job status, and less helpful than it once was.
I’m not leaping to change it just yet — if I get the new job, it involves a lot of work-from-home, which changes my what can get done math a little — but I’m making a note to review and rethink this once we get to May.