Balancing Act

I’ve taken to doing a Friday Status Update here on the blog, recapping where I’m at and what’s going on in various parts of the world, which means that Thursdays are rapidly becoming the day when I review projects and make decisions about the coming week. 

I started today by doing a brain dump of all the projects that are occupying my attention at the moment–essentially, the things on my to-do list that are proving sticky, nagging at my attention because I don’t feel adequately in-control or like they’re advancing.

The short-list runs something like this:

• Write my conference paper
• Prepare for mid-candidature review on my thesis
• Produce at least two more thesis novella drafts
• Finalise the current thesis novella draft
• Write four more thesis chapters
• Finish Warhol Sleeping
• Tidy my desk (still a force of chaos)
• Update the old CGW products (particularly the two books that are at the short-burst-of-busy-work stage)
• Finish my plan for the the next non-fiction book from Brain Jar
• Expand the on-boarding sequence for my newsletter and flesh out the subscriber bonuses.
• Do the copy and upload of two new short stories that will be coming out
• Finish the two ghost stories that are on the Short Fiction Lab docket.
• Refine the blurb and copy around the existing books in the Brain Jar listing
• Wrap my head around long-term promo tactics for indie authors
• Finish the re-pricing sweep of Brain Jar Products on multiple platforms
• Write new books for Brain Jar (and others).

My long-list is considerably more expansive–I use Omnifocus to keep it all stored–but this is the stuff that bubbles up when I try to figure out how to use my work hours ever day.

They’re also projects where my momentum gets tends to stall, for two reasons. The first is that each of those lines is actually a package of mini-tasks bundled under a deceptively simple to-do, and it’s easy to lose track of (or mis-judge) what needs to happen next in order to keep things moving.

The second is the tendency for long-term and short-term goals to come into conflict, which means figuring out the urgency of a particular task is more complicated than it looks.

For instance, the paper and the mid-candidature review both have deadlines attached, as do the broader PhD novella and chapters (although those are further away). And while they’re urgent, in the sense that it’s important I hit those deadlines, that urgency doesn’t make them the most important projects on that list.

My business model, at present, lies in building a solid foundation of backlist titles and entry-points into my work over a period of five or six years. Getting to the point where, once someone has picked something up in a particular line, there’s multiple choices about what to read next that might appeal.

If RPG publishing taught me anything, it’s the power of backlist sales and a willingness to play the long game. 

And so the to-do list becomes a matter of finding balance: The stuff with the biggest long-term impact, in terms of meeting your goals, is rarely the stuff that gets on the list by virtue of screaming urgency. 

Worse, the looming urgency makes it easy to forget that the short-term tasks still do have value towards your long-term goals, it’s just that their relative value is now eclipsed by the fact that they’re demanding a larger share of your attention. 

I cannot achieve everything on that list in a day. Or a week. Or even a month. Which means the first task on that list isn’t really write my conference paper, it’s deciding on what’s important before I start work for the day.

Asking my brain to distinguish between urgent and important on the fly, in the seconds between finishing one task and starting the next, only increases the sense of having too little hours and not enough skill to achieve everything. It kicks in the flight-or-fight reflexes–decide now and decide smart, or the sabretooth is going to eat you–instead of giving me space to rationally consider what’s really important. 

By the time this gets posted, I’ll have six hours of time to devote to all these tasks before my work day is done. Making the decisions about what gets my focus, before the work starts, lets me make good use of the hours I’ve got, instead of hoping I can magically create more hours to achieve everything right now.