Non-overwhelming organization for multi-passionates

I recently posted a short reflection about how I apply my multi-passionate nature to web design, in which I explained how I embraced it instead of making it work against me. One of the ways I’ve learned to embrace it is by organizing in a way that’s aware of all my projects and supports my pursuit of multiple passions, hobbies and interests.

I’ve recently reorganized my projects in a way that I’ve kept with me for longer than an organization system has worked for me before, so I wanted to dive into what I’ve learned in my trials and errors trying to organize many projects to avoid becoming overwhelmed.

I’ve narrowed down these learnings into two guidelines, which are the base that makes my current organization work for me:

→ Don’t overorganize
→ Organize, don’t track

Don’t overorganize

Every time I became overwhelmed from having many projects, ideas and things I want to do, I’ve tried to create a perfect organization system, only for that to become overwhelming on its own. I think we often fail to organize well because the very organization sometimes ends up getting in the way of actually doing things. Especially when you have many things to manage, organizing too much can quickly have the opposite effect and become overwhelming too.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably fallen into this cycle before:

After repeating this cycle too many times and in search of something that would actually work, I have come to the realization that a perfect system isn’t what works, but a system that I can actually stick to. As people with a touch of shiny object syndrome, an “optimized system“ is very appealing and seems like the solution to all problems, but a perfect system isn’t useful if we can’t keep up with it.

Perfection is the enemy of consistency

Organizing, for me, should be balanced between taking my mind off things as much as possible, while keeping my system as simple as possible. What works best is finding the sweet spot between “too little” and “too much”. My current organization system isn’t perfect or “optimized”, but it works for me because of this core concept.

The sweet spot is probably different for everyone, but hopefully we can all generally recognize where our “not enough” and “too much” limits are. The key is a system that organizes enough to handle everything well, but that doesn’t take too much time to set up, and most importantly, to keep up with regularly.

In a future post, I’ll talk about the specifics of how I organize my projects and explain what “just right” is for me.

Organize, don’t track

Tracking your projects is a way to see your efforts in a visual, tangible way, but just like overorganizing, being focused on tracking can get in the way of actually doing things. For me, every time I’ve tried to track things consistently, it has become a dependency that ended up demotivating me.

It can be rewarding and fun, but in my case, it’s not worth having to constantly go back and track everything I did. And the joy you get from tracking is temporary, really. For me, it shifts the focus from passion, enjoyment and fulfillment to something external like a box to check.

How do I measure progress instead? How do I keep track of my efforts?

I find that it’s more rewarding to see my progress in my skill than in the amount of time I put into something, or the insights that a Notion chart can give me (still love them, though). It’s when I see that I’m becoming better at something, or that I’m enjoying something more than I did a few weeks back. It’s not something tangible, but a feeling I have that indicates progress.

In other cases, there are also external fruits of my efforts. For example, if I’m working on a creative project, the piece I end up with itself is also a symbol of my efforts.

Journaling is a great way to write about the things I did in a way that focuses on quality, not quantity. I often do go back and think about the things I did that day, almost like a diary, and sometimes I reflect about my processes, possible concerns, progress…

So how to organize, not track?

Apart from having no manual* tracking systems, I make sure that what goes into my organization system is what I want to do, not what I’ve already done. The point of organization is to avoid being overwhelmed so that I can actually do things, and so if I already did do things without organizing them, I don’t need to go back and add done tasks to a list. This allows for spontaneity, instead of punishing it.

It’s called “to-do list”, not “did list”, for a reason!

*I do use automatic tracking, for example: I sometimes track the amount of hours I work on something, in a pomodoro app called “Focusmeter”, which automatically creates insights. The tracking is never done together with organization.

An “exception”

There might be big projects that have many steps that need to be organized, and you might need to know what’s already done and what isn’t. But in that case I’d say that still counts as organizing, or managing, a project.

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To summarize these guidelines, it all comes down to:

• Using organization as a tool, and not a measure of productivity

• Embracing imperfection as the solution to inconsistency

• Keeping things simple and easy to use and come back to

• Organizing to support doing the things we like to do

• Detaching progress and outcome from organization

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This is the first post of a series I’m starting on organizing as a multi-passionate. To receive updates about the next posts, sign up for my newsletter below.