Spreading myself too thin

Or recognising that I should not apply myself like nutella

Confucius said that

The man who chases two rabbits catches none.

I feel like I’ve been chasing a lot of rabbits this past year. Barefoot. Across gravel. Unwittingly waving my net in the air on a stick like a flag of surrender.

The past month I’ve been giving serious thought to easing back off my seemingly endless list of projects. I’m not feeling the love anymore, and I know that’s a dangerous headspace for me to get into. It’s the harbinger of time for a break. The sunrise of pulling the eject lever.

Thankfully, one very useful tool that I’ve developed as part of all this work on myself is a certain level of self awareness. It’s noticing when those thoughts come up and then questioning them before they take hold.

Hang on, I recognise this set of emotions. That generally means…[insert some uncomfortable emotional state here].

Once I’d recognised what was going on internally, I wrote a list of everything I had on the back burner (which had grown to the size of something you’d see in an industrial kitchen):

• Teaching meditation

• Psychotherapy with clients

• Software engineering consultancy

• Writing a book

• An idea for another book that I would constantly tinker with when I had a free moment

• Streaming myself playing video games on Twitch (I don’t really know what I was trying to achieve with this)

• A partner in a corporate wellbeing organisation

• A weekly podcast

• Creating articles on software engineering

• Building a learning platform for meditation practises

That looks like a long list, doesn’t it? It’s actually a lot smaller than they used to be. Even writing that last statement, the only word that comes to mind is a long, drawn out fuuuuuuuck, screamed into a pillow.

One of the most important skills I had to work on when it came to these project lists was getting the hang of saying no. Both to others and, more importantly, to myself. This may not be particularly specific to you, but hear me out. This is my experience and it’s all I’ve got to go on in life.

My brain likes things to do. It thrives on them. If there are no projects, then it gets into this death spiral on the quest for meaning. I start wearing black polo necks and smoking and quoting Sartre at anything that will listen. In that, I recognise and embrace that having things to write or build or create is good for my mental health.

The problem arises when I have so many of these projects that I have to stack them into a psychological Jenga tower. Eventually, I’ll pull on one a little too much and the whole lot comes crashing down. The whole lot being metaphorically representative of my state of mind. Then I’m back to black polo necks and smoking again.

I’ve had to get good at recognising when the tower is too tall for me to handle. Over time it will creep, because when the tower’s small and I’ve got a lot of mental capacity, my mind is full of ideas and I want to create as much as I possibly can.

I’ll go into autopilot mode where every idea is a good idea and deserves my attention. Then, a few weeks later, there’s another idea, and that sounds good as well. Then another the next month, and none of these ideas will be small in stature. It’ll be something grandiose that requires a lot of planning and effort.

By the end, there’s a half finished sculpture rendered in one corner of the room, a new and obscure instrument that I’ve decided to learn on the coffee table, and a hundred wires spiralling from the Wifi router into a robot head on the sofa that I’ve hooked up to Chat GPT because I wanted something other than my cat to talk to at 3am.

More often than not, it’s all about saying no to me. It’s about recognising what’s actually going to be a worthwhile use of my time, and what’s just going to be another unfinished hole that I throw myself down in search of rabbits.

I’m still going to do it, and I have to recognise that it’s part of my nature. I just have to get better at tempering the list.

My actions, then, from that list above, is to do the following:

• Resign from being a partner in the corporate wellbeing organisation (that’s done, and I finish in 2 weeks time)

• Stop streaming yourself to Twitch. Come on, that was all ego, wasn’t it?

• Park the idea for the other book whilst I finish the first one

• Most surprisingly, I’m no longer going to be working in a one to one setting with new clients. I thoroughly enjoy it, but at the moment it’s taking too much out of me and I need to let it go.

I’ll write a follow up to this article in a few weeks, so that I can hold myself accountable to checking-in and reviewing how I’m feeling after taking a few items off the to-do list. Maybe there’s more we need to trim. We’ll see.

Much love,
David

PS I really went for it on Midjourney tonight.

---