One of the problems I have, I think, is that I have a mess of ideas for stuff that I want to do and there’s no proper boundary between projects I am officially working on, stuff I’d like to do, or just vague ideas I have in my head. If someone were to ask me what sort of creative projects was working on at the moment, apart from my (almost) weekly Nukezilla column, I could only give them vague ideas.
What’s for sure is that there are more things I’d like to do than I have time to do. I figure that if I work at it I can give a proper amount of attention to about three long term projects at a time (discounting Nukezilla); defining a proper amount as devoting a small amount of time to at least two and hopefully all of them every week. Everything else is just an idea. Ideas are fine, but I should just write them down in a notebook or web page or something. The notebook should be headed ‘Things I Am Not Working On’ just so that I can be clear with myself that it’s okay that I’m not working on these things because I’m working on other things. When I need something new to work on, I can always revisit that list.
‘Things I Am Working On’ will a seperate notebook, web page, whatever. It contains no more than three projects at a time. Apart from that each project contains a list of things that I need to do to make progress on it, which could be short (‘write the damned article!’) or long depending on the project and how many things I can be doing in parallel.
What happens if I want a break from a project? Perhaps I’m growing a bit tired of it, or I just feel like I’ve done enough of it for the time being because it’s an ongoing project which doesn’t have a clearly defined end. Well, there is always scope to rotate projects in and out of each book, as long as I don’t do this too readily. If I want to put a project on ice for a while, it should go in a special section in ‘Things I Am Not Working On’ so that I know to look there first before embarking on something completely new.
Well, that’s the plan.
