As someone with diverse skills, interests, and talents – what some would call a modern-day polymath – project prioritization and managing competing projects is something you probably struggle with on a regular basis.
When there’s a continuous overflow of ideas on your mind. When there are ten different projects you’d like to pursue and only 24h in the day. When your attention and excitement are drifting in a thousand different directions and you begin to feel like Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit, always running around ‘late’ from one destination to the next.
So what do you do? How do you avoid spreading yourself too thin? How do you deal with the inspiration overload?
Essentially, how do you choose?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a bit of a hard time choosing.
Mostly because, by definition, it means giving up something else. Whenever we make a decision, there’s always an opportunity cost that comes hand in hand with it. That thing we must sacrifice to get a grip of that other thing we believe to want even more.
Like it or not, life is packed with choice. And when you’re a freelancer, entrepreneur, or creator of any kind, even more so. Not only because you’re forced to make infinite micro-decisions on a daily basis, but because your mind has the natural tendency to ideate and envision a world of possibilities stemming from almost anything.
It’s no wonder that we’re sometimes faced with analysis paralysis. Stuck at the intersection where two opposite paths drift away.
However, sometimes we forget, that not choosing, is also a choice. And that the fact that you can (do something), doesn’t always mean you should.
Choosing and narrowing down our focus is necessary if we want to succeed at anything. If we want to get stuff done. If we want to follow along and finish. If we want our vision and ideas to come to life.
I know I want that.
So if you do too, keep reading, because I’m going to share with you 3 effective questions that have changed the way I think about project prioritization and help me choose whenever my mental real state starts to get crammed up.
I first heard them from Charly Gilkey, who’s a productivity strategist and consultant for creative professionals, and his practical – yet philosophical – approach to managing priorities blew my mind away. Mostly because it diverts from the classic project prioritization models and matrixes that take time and revenue (outcomes) into account as the two primary objective factors.
The thing is, oftentimes our hearts are much better decision-makers than our brains. We underestimate the trustworthiness of our intuition.
Have you ever made a decision based on your logical thinking, after weighing out all the pros and cons, and regretted the bitter aftertaste? As if something in your heart knew that although it’s objectively right on paper, it doesn’t sit right with you.
This first project prioritization question is my favorite one and should help you avoid just that:
1. Which one causes more pain when I reach for it?
Let’s say you’ve got 3 big projects that you want to start working on immediately. They get you hyped up, excited, and motivated. They’re continuously floating around your mind, and so you want to use that momentum and burst of inspiration to make them take off all at once.
However, you begin to realize – slightly frustrated – that whenever you start focusing your energy, time and attention on one of them, the others start to lose altitude. Realistically, there’s not enough time in the day to keep all the balls up in the air.
Now imagine, that from those 3 ideas that you have, I told you that I was going to take one from you, and you would never be able to work on it again. Ever.
Which one causes the most pain when I start reaching for it? Which one makes you go: ‘Ay, not that one!’ when I try to take it away from you?
Because there’s your answer.
Sometimes we underestimate the power of our gut feeling. But when I look back, every single great decision I’ve made has always been made from the heart. Following a guiding voice inside of me rather than a pro’s and con’s list.
So this is the question I try to go back to every time I face a big decision or wake up to a full plate of projects and spread out inspiration.
2. Which one is more likely to widen your opportunity surface area?
Some projects constrain you, while others expand your opportunity surface area.
If you think about it, some decisions we make create a whole set of new opportunities around them, enabling us to have more freedom, more autonomy, more authority, and more options to choose from after that.
So throughout your project prioritization process, out of those 3 big projects you had in mind, it’s useful to reflect on which one is most likely to expand your world of opportunities and give way to new exciting pathways, versus which ones will limit you.
Out of those 3 things, which is the one that is more likely to build a set of opportunities that are consistent with where you want to go?
3. Which one can you finish faster?
Tik-tok. Here’s that pressured element of time again, and you’re back to feeling like the White Rabbit.
But not so quick.
This question is not encouraging you to lean into the low-hanging fruit type of projects. It’s not trying to make you sacrifice your long-term goals for short-term income. Actually, it’s the opposite.
It’s trying to make you think ‘what are the things that I can finish today, that will build the next step in the ladder leading to where I want to be tomorrow?’
It’s about bridging the gap between your current reality and the life you want to live in, the position you want to be in, and the work you want to be doing in the future.
Finished projects are that bridge.
Let’s say you’re currently working as a chef in the hospitality industry, but what you’d really like is to shift towards a writer position within the arts and culture space by blending and professionalizing your passion for art and writing. There’s a few project ideas floating around your mind for some time now.
On the one hand, there’s this project to open up your own food truck that serves high-end cuisine in urban and underground settings of the city, offering a clash of experiences. On the other, there’s this contemporary art gallery you’d love to work for, writing press releases and articles about their most prominent artists, or the different stories and backgrounds behind their exhibits.
If the arts and culture scene is where you dream of being in the future, then it’s important for you to prioritize and finish the smaller chunk of tasks and projects that are more closely related to that new reality. Creating your writing portfolio, sending out some sample press releases and articles, and networking within the art and culture space are projects that you can finish today which will bring you closer to where you want to be tomorrow.
Contrarily, not finishing the arts and culture-related tasks means you stay stuck where you are. Maintaining your current reality is not going to create change in your life or take you any closer to that best vision you have for yourself.
If like me, you always find yourself trying to decide which exciting new project to pursue next, and choosing and giving up projects is something you struggle with, it’s most likely because you lack clarity in how those projects affect your resources, identity, and vision of the future.
This simple three-question project prioritization process can be greatly effective in helping us remove the clutter, and gain clarity over where we truly want to focus our limited time, energy, and attention. And as opposed to other project priority processes, it provides context for why we are choosing what we are choosing.
So I hope that the next time you begin to feel overwhelmed by possibility, these three simple questions will help you manage your competing priorities and bring your most meaningful work out to the world.