Dealing with too many projects and focus

I’ve got a large number of projects going on right now and am not completely happy with how I’ve handled them. There’s a number of ways that I think it can be improved, which I’ll share with you below.

It’s easy enough to work on things that need work, but having a number of open projects can leave me with numerous open loops and projects that get left behind…and not always on purpose. That’s not good and it’s something I want to fix.

Having Too Many Good Things Going On

Over time I tend to accrue too many open projects and have to trim things back.

It’s something I’ve learned about myself over time and have a few tools I use to keep things in check.

First is the quarterly review. Every 3 months I do a review that takes an hour or two and has multiple questions about what’s going well, what isn’t, etc, and includes what I’m working on.

This acts as a natural filter for cutting a lot of projects that are lingering on, need to be finished up, or just aren’t producing the intended results.

If I get overwhelmed in between these reviews, or have a hard time deciding and find myself focusing too much on stress about ongoing projects, I turn to the Focus Finder to get all the projects and ideas out of my head and assign them some rough scores.

Doing this helps me put some numbers to the ideas tumbling around my head and lets me more easily see what is actually important and what can wait.

If you haven’t used the Focus Finder or a similar tool for figuring out what to focus on, I suggest giving it a shot now, or during your next planning session.

Recommended

Keeping The Important…Important

Even if I’ve narrowed down my active projects by using my quarterly review or the Focus Finder as described above, sometimes a project won’t need my input for a week or two - how do I keep these on my mind? And should I?

I say yes.

If they become not important then I can remove them from my list of active projects.

If they’re important, then I want to keep them on my mind and aware of them so that I can quickly move when needed.

However, just using digital tools has worked…moderately well.

Right now I:

• Have reminders, tasks, and projects in ClickUp

• Am working on a Chrome extension that shows active projects and goals whenever I open a new tab (beta version working)

• Have a whiteboard where I put my weekly A-Goals along with quarterly goals

But I can’t quickly say how many active projects I have going on or what the next action/task/forward movement is.

And that’s a problem.

One of the solutions I’ve looked at is to restrict active projects to a bare minimum (1 to 3) and only allow a new project to enter when one is completed.

This is known as the “Pull” method, as in you’re pulling a project onto your plate when you’re done with one instead of having things pushed onto your plate.

Sounds good, but I’m not sure that it’s the right fit for me at this time although if I’m honest with myself this is likely something I’ll incorporate into my project processes before too long.

And I know myself - I need this to be relatively “in my face”…which is why a whiteboard works so great for weekly goals.

Writing them out by hand helps and having them nearby means I see them all the time.

Since I travel a bit or find myself working outside of the home often, I don’t think I’ll be packing a whiteboard around for this.

For now, I’m looking at 2 solutions:

1. Post it notes on my physical journal

2. Google Keep widget on my phone home screen dedicated to active projects

The goal is to keep active projects top of mind so that:

• they get worked on

• they remain in my brain where I’ll be likely to have “shower thoughts” (no, not that kind!) about them

• if they become not important, I can make the decision to stop working on them

I’ll be working on implementing this soon, if you have a favorite method for doing this or want to hear how it goes so you can do the same for yourself, let me know.

Extra Extra

• Using AI tools to help review your journaling and get more out of it?

• What are you doing when you procrastinate? Is there something that you could with that long term?

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