Juggling.

We all do it.

We all have too many things on and more than one "priority" we have to deal with.

Right?

You have a side hustle, maybe a Creative Side Project , family commitments, and the bills still gotta be paid and the kids gotta eat.

Guru advice about focusing totally on one thing, doing deep work in four hour sessions etc. is great. If you can build your life around that, do it for as long as you can. But when you're a grown-up adult with responsibilities and not a Twitter guru then life often doesn't work that way.

In fact, it's such a problem...

...I have a whole article on this in The Write Way Welcome Course.

But as one of the project I'm currently spinning up in the air is a revamp of that course, I wanted to revisit and expand it into a permanent issue of the Write Way.

After all I wrote that two years and 71 issues ago.

Many things have changed.

I quit my job to focus on writing. I had another kid. I stepped back from most client work. I got new work editing for major publisher and creating audio content for apps. I'm being approached about writing articles for various publications. I've created a bunch more courses and training, and so on and so forth.

One thing hasn't changed.

There are still twenty-four hours on each of your standard earth-days, seven of those days in a week, and you still have a limited number of those left.

(Fewer than before.)

So as before, let's add up some analogies and careen through this important topic with some help from our titular Leporidae.

(The scientific family name for hares and jackrabbits, for those that didn't know.)

Our first analogy is all about

Remember the old glass ball analogy?

You have a set of juggling balls. Only for some reason, one of them is made of glass. Why? Because it's important for the analogy of course. Who said it had to make sense?

Anyway, juggling. Balls. One is glass.

When you're juggling and it gets a bit too much, which one will you catch whatever happens?

The glass one, right?

The rest will be fine, you'll lose some of that magical momentum, but it'll survive.

You can pick them up after.

Everything you're working on in your life is a juggling ball.

Work, side hustles, exercise, creative work.

All standard spheres.

They'll survive a few drops. If you're like me, you need to pick up that creative ball every so often or you're miserable, but it'll survive a few days. Maybe even weeks if you have to.

Your family and key relationships are the glass ball.

If you're a dad, you know this. Your kids don't bounce back from being neglected. And they're far more precious than any amount of money.

So this cliché gives me principle number uno. Drop everything when family needs your focus.

When my kids are sick or struggling, writing goes on the back-burner. My content queue is copy-pasta for a week. When I’m sick, same again. When family needs me, I'm there.

Another analogy.

You're drifting out to sea and...

The water in the boat is urgent, right?

Right.

So bailing out that water is an urgent task...

...but it's not your most important task.

Your most important task is fixing the leak that's letting the water in in the first place!

It's the old Eisenhower matrix you can look up yourself if you care. The important part is that urgent does not equal important.

Urgent is the task that wants done now. Important is the task that makes real progress.

For a writing business, the constant content queue for social media feels urgent and immediate. But it's really not that important. Meanwhile, writing your book or creating a major course - those are important tasks that never feel quite so urgent.

So stop procrastinating the important stuff with the urgent.

Yeah, urgent needs dealt with but try this:

Spend the first hour of every single day working on your most important task before you even let yourself look at the urgent stuff. Spend the rest of the day sprinting through as much urgent stuff as you can, then repeat.

Over time you'll start to open more space - maybe you can start spending the whole morning working on the important, then deal with urgent stuff in the afternoon.

But trust me, never do it the other way round.

If you do, you'll never get ahead.

A third analogy.

A young hare challenges a tortoise to a race. They set off, the hare at full speed, the tortoise slow and steady.

The hare starts to daydream about his glory and forget the humdrum stepping that gets him there. Soon the tortoise plod plod plods his way to victory.

It's a real problem for us write-fast-and-get-it-done types.

You're juggling multiple projects at any one time and it's easy to set one down for a quick nap and...

...it's gone.

Woops.

Whaddya do instead?

Simple, dear reader, simple.

Be tortoise. Be hare.

Let go of the daydreams. Focus on the humdrum daily plodding that gets you there.

It's too easy to daydream about being a best-selling author and never write any books. Too easy to daydream about going viral and not put in the reps. Too easy to focus on the big maybe and ignore the small definitely.

You get one good sprint in and suddenly you're thinking "maybe one day I'll have a million dollars" and ignoring the chance to definitely earn an extra $100 today. You're thinking "maybe one day I'll sell a million books" and not definitely write one book.

But those small definitelys add up.

Fifteen minutes a day of writing is a hundred words. A hundred words a day is seven hundred a week. Say a novel is seventy-thousand words, well, that's a year and a half.

That might seem a long time. But it's less time than if you sprint through the first five-thousand words and then stop for a nap, daydream a little about being finished...

...and don't write anything for a year.

You try and focus, but there are many things that do have to be done. You have things to juggle. You can't just say "eh, I'll ignore those for a month while I do this one, besides I need an uninterrupted few days to work on this..."

But waiting for those perfect times to arrive means you let things fall by the way, and then when you get a chance to sprint, you're rusty. Your knees are creaky from all that sitting down. You fell asleep by the track while you daydreamed about being done and now everyone else is near the finish line.

Dear reader, you need to be a hare. You need to sprint.

Otherwise you'll never get anything done. Plodding is great, but it's hard to feel like you're making tangible progress. You gotta have those times you go all out pedal to the metal and get it done. Break those mental blocks, write a novel in a month or two, crank out huge volumes of content etc.

Dear reader, you also need to be a tortoise. You need to plod.

After all, it's far easier to break into a sprint from a brisk walk than it is after an hour of sitting on the couch.

The way to juggle as much as you can is what I call the Tortoise-Hare model.

Plod, plod, plod and Sprint. Plod, plod, plod and Sprint. Plod, plod, plod and Sprint.

In other words, be the tortoise that plods steadily towards their goal forever AND be the hare that sprints fast. Yes, you'll never sprint as fast as the hare will. But you'll also never stop completely and fall asleep.

You keep most of the balls in the air, and you spin one right up to the stratosphere.

So never let daydreams distract you. Set yourself a minimum viable progress to make on every project each week and plod through it. Then sprint when you can.

Rest by plodding on the next thing, not by sitting down to daydream.

Does this mean you can juggle it all?

You can't. Nobody can. You're mortal. Finite. A small creature in a big world. Of the making of many books there is no end and much study is a weariness of the flesh. You are limited, and possibilities are endless. You are time bound, tired and treading water half the time…

…And that's okay.

Because it means your choices matter. And it frees you to focus on the important stuff and let everyone else's expectations drift.

It frees you to sprint. And it frees you to plod.

Fifteen minutes here, half an hour there.

Plod.

Plod.

Plod.

Sprint.

Plod Plod Plod.

But, of course, to make any of that work, you have to learn to write fast so you can make those sprints count.

When you're ready to learn that, I can help: https://getpaidwrite.thrivecart.com/sds/

And until then,

May your pipe be slow and your pen be fast,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

fin