I was listening to Lewis Howes interviewing Jon Taffer on The School Of Greatness. At the 30 minute mark Taffer talked about how he deals with having multiple projects on the go:
“You know, I wake up every day and I think to myself, I’ve got these twelve balls on my desk and each one is a project or something that’s important to me. And I have to move those balls every day. If I don’t move every ball I can’t sleep at night. I’m a nutcase. So I don’t live my life by completing things necessarily, because things take time to complete. I have to move every ball every day or I freak out. It’s something that if I don’t make progress every day I can’t live with myself. So I truly move every ball every day.”
…
“When are there too many balls?”
“When you can’t move them anymore. The minute I can’t move all of them I have too many. So then you either have to remove some of them from your desk, put them aside, or you have to start to prioritize. If you can’t move every ball every day then you’ve got too many balls. I mean, that’s just the way I look at it in a simplistic sense. There’s some balls are more important than others, bigger than others. And there you move those first. And of course, we have priorities. But if you’re gonna start eleven things then you move eleven things every day. Or only start ten. Only start nine. And that’s really important because without that progress there’s no growth. And without growth there’s no result.”
I began to think about my blogs as my “balls on the table” and how I ought to try and move each ball down the table a little every day, in contrast to the competing idea that you should focus on your “ONE” thing to the exclusion of all else.
So let’s see what happens if I do that. Or let’s just see if I can do that.
Here are my current blogs, my “balls on the table,” and the current state of play:
- DavidHurleyInJapan.com – lots of content, but largely neglected, except the current reading list.
- Top5Programs.com – my primary business blog, regularly updated twice a week.
- EasyChessTips.com – no progress here for several months.
- ThousandAMonth.com – a new project that I’m hoping to get up and running in March or April…
- BestWayToGetFreeBitcoin.com – another new project that I’m hoping to get up and running soon.
- PerennialTarot.com – no more than a domain name and an idea.
- MahjongInJapan.com – an old project that I moved to a new domain and abandoned.
Are there too many balls here? Should I remove MahjongInJapan from the table? Or find a way to do something, no matter how small, to each blog every day?
Small things you can do would be things like:
- fix a broken link
- restore a photo
- promote a blog post on social media
- add a letter about a blog post to your autoresponder series
- keyword research
- plan a blog post
- write 100 words of a blog post
This blog post is the first roll of one of the balls…
David Hurley
#InspiredFocus