Everything All The Time

Thinking about next year, rough drafts, and doing many things well

I want to finish the first draft of the book I am writing. I have about 30,000 words right now.

I want to record a record with some of the songs I've written over the past four or five years.

I want to launch the full vision for Printernet, which involves quite a bit of code.

I want to learn Spanish. I want to be conversationally fluent for a 20 - 30 minute (non-technical) conversation.

I have several collaborative projects underway and a few more in the queue.

I want to run a marathon.

How can I do all of these things in a year? Maybe I shouldn't worry about the timeline, but knowing how many things I tend to explore, I know that time is short. I don't want to do all of these things for some sense of "high achievement" or "self-mastery". I want to do these things because they call to me. They come from within. They feel authentic to what I am about and the type of person I see myself becoming. They give me energy and excitement for life.

But the reality of the situation is I don't have time for all of them, though I often try to ignore that truth. My months typically look like the following:

For three days I pursue some update to the Printernet automation software I've written. It is working, then I get more ambitious. Now it isn't working, then finally after several more hours, it works again. An order or two come in. I spend the next two days of free time fulfilling those orders. Then I write a blog post. I get half of the first draft done one morning, then finish it and post it the next. I share it on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the works. Now I am strumming my guitar or sitting at the piano. A melody finds me. I record it in my voice memos. Then a week later I want to write real lyrics for it. I have a meeting Monday with one friend for a writing project we are working on together, then another meeting Wednesday with another friend for a software project. I have an idea for an update to my website and spend an afternoon coding. The end of the month is approaching, I ought to get my monthly roundup prepped. And on and on.

Reading that (and writing it) might make the solution obvious: do less. Like Steve Jobs said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” If I simplified and focused, I could probably finish the first draft of my book in a few months. Or I could record and put out an EP. Or I could create the best version of Printernet I've imagined. Or I could train for and complete a marathon. But I can't do them all. Not without prioritization and tradeoffs.

That actually isn't right. I can do them all. I know this because that is the current state of things, as I described above. I am doing them all. So what am I getting at? It's that I can't produce output for them all as quickly as I'd like. Meaning I can't put out finished songs, great essays, and great software all within the same few months. That is the tradeoff of working across many interests. Instead of producing one great essay every two months say, I am lucky to product one great essay every six because throughout those six months I am also working on software and music, blog posts and collaborations. That is a fundamental struggle within the practice of Polymathematics.

But I enjoy doing all of these things. Meaning I enjoy the act of doing them, even when doing them all in tandem delays reaching the finish lines I define for them. Is there a real problem here then? If I try to state it clearly it is something like: I want to continue doing all of the things I enjoy doing in tandem while also producing output I am proud of in a reasonable timeframe. And I guess I’ve been feeling like the timeframe for producing work I am proud of has been unreasonable lately. It’s a feeling of being spread too thin, like too little butter over too much toast as Bilbo Baggins put it. So the solution must either be 1) change my own expectations of a "reasonable timeframe" (be content with taking longer) or 2) change my own process to redefine what "doing [them] in tandem" means (get better at doing them all). I can either give myself permission to take longer to produce output or I can change my current approach to doing them all in a way that increases the output per unit of time. What would these two options look like?

Changing my expectations around the velocity of my creative output seems like the wrong approach. It is effectively submitting to my current capabilities and process, finding peace with the shortcomings of it. But the tension I am feeling lately is a result of the current process and my intuition is that the tension would just resurface again and again. Can mindfulness really solve the issue here? Maybe, but it is worth examining my process and seeing if I can improve something there first.

I often think of how nice a Director's life must be. I envy how their careers are an endless series of fresh new projects. For a year or two of their lives, they go all in on a specific aesthetic, era, or set of ideas. Then, they move onto the next. Picture Christopher Nolan learning everything he can about magic while making The Presitige, then getting to think about the logic of dreams all day for Inception, learning about relativity and black holes for Interstellar, studying World War II in detail for Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. How cool is that?

Whereas my current work is an endless overlap driven by the day to day whim of what excites me, Directors approach their interests like a series of connected train cars, one project after the next, forever. Nolan wasn’t working on Tenet while working on The Dark Knight, yet he got to work on both. Can I replicate that? I've started to experiment with trying.

A few months ago I gave myself a challenge. I called it "30 days of creative programming". For 30 days, I would make one video and coding project every day. I wanted to feel what it felt like to work on a single thing for a full month. That might sound odd to you, but as you read above, for me it was totally opposite to how I flow between projects. So how did it feel?

It felt great. Removing the choice of what to work on each day felt like taking off a weighted vest. I loved the simplicity of that kind of singular focus. My whole brain shifted its attention to programming. All my walks led to ideas for a new coding project, rather than an idea for a new song plus an idea for a short story plus an idea for a new Chrome Extension. I knew what I needed to work on each day and got constant momentum from getting things done quickly. But there were downsides too. Because of the nature of producing work "worth sharing" every single day, I got pretty burnt out by the end of it. I started searching for "easier" ideas. This was because I set the goal of one video / project per day, but that needn't be part of the train car method.

What if I did 30 days of programming where the output was just one project? I suspect the burnout would be significantly reduced. I also still found time for some of my other work, it was just filtered through programming since that is how I spent my month. I still wrote blog posts, they were just about programming instead of a wider variety of things.

After the 30 days of creative programming experiment, I found myself wanting to set a similar block of focus for writing or music. I think this model of deeply focusing on one workstream at a time while still getting to work on 2 - 4 workstreams per year is very powerful. Imagine producing one book and one album every year for the next three decades. I’d have 30 books and 30 albums, which is staggeringly prolific by any standard. Would it solve the tension I am currently feeling? I think it could. The main drawback I foresee is removing that beautiful spontaneous inspiration that comes from working on everything all the time. I love following my most intense curiosity or interest on any given day. This is what Neuroscientist + Inventor David Eagleman calls The Lazy Susan Method of productivity and is also how Walt Whitman worked too. I like the variety and looseness of this method, it is fun talking about software and fiction in the same week. There is no 6 month roadmap that must be stuck to strictly, the landscape is one of endless branching paths and I take whichever calls to me on any given day. Can I preserve that feeling while adopting the train car approach to blocking work like a Director? In other words, can I keep the looseness and lightness while gaining focus and speed?

I think I could if I got creative. Firstly, I could dedicate one day out of the seven day week for "free days". So even during a month or two of deep focus on writing, I could reserve Saturdays for exploring whatever I wanted, whether it was some new programming idea or writing a song. Another idea to preserve that exciting variety would be to get better at having new ideas without pursuing them immediately. If I am in a "music month" but have an idea for a short story, I can simply add it to my "fiction ideas" page in Notion and let it steep until my next "writing month". I already do this, but for the best ideas find it exceedingly difficult to avoid the riptide of inspiration in the moment. Another idea is using my podcast as an outlet for the other work I am not currently focusing on. If I am in a "coding month" I can get a lot of joy from chatting with a writer or musician on the podcast.

The more I write the clearer it is that I've been circling this idea for a while. When I asked Tim Ferris at SXSW this year how he manages his many interests he basically advised the train car method to work. There were seeds of this approach in my 2022 "Rough Drafts Over Resolutions" idea. And as I've said, this year I tried the 30 days of creative programming approach and saw a lot of the benefit. I think it could really work for me.

The remaining roadblock to fully switching to the train car method is all the projects currently underway. I've committed to a few different projects spanning the categories of the work I love doing, and I can't just pause or abandon them for months at a time. They've already started. Here is the breakdown:

Writing: 1 active collaboration

Music: 0 active collaborations

Invention: 2 active collaborations

So longer term, I think the train car method works. I can decide to accept collaborative work based on what my current capacity is (I feel very silly writing that because it is so obviously simple) as well as the type of work I am currently focusing on (writing, music, invention, etc). But for now, I will accept reduced output velocity as a tradeoff for the day to day novelty of working across many domains for my current collaborations.

This is all coming up because I am beginning to think about next year and the rough draft for 2024. A key aspect to writing a rough draft for what you want your year to look like is reflecting on the current year. What were the best parts you want to expand? What were the parts you’d like to reduce or eliminate? I try to remind myself the problem of having too many fascinating projects to work on is a wonderful problem. The tension I’ve been feeling is probably just a healthy signal that I’ve reached the limit of what I can work on all at once. But Polymathematics is about exploring the pursuit of many interests and I really do think this train car style of work is a wonderful method worth experimenting with. If I find it too rigid or limiting, I can always return to the wild woods with their endless branching paths.