I have a confession. I am constantly falling in love, developing crushes, spinning off into daydreams about how great it would be to ride off into the sunset together. Sometimes it even makes it hard to fall asleep, or I wake up too early and am immediately thinking about them. Ah, love.
But I’m not talking about people here (although I totally get the poly or non-monogamy thing). I’m talking about ideas. Creative inspiration. Projects. There are just so many amazing possibilities in life, and I want to try them all!
Maybe you’re the same way. Maybe you see potential business ventures everywhere. Or book plots, or new clothing designs. There’s a melody in your head as you shower, a new spice combination as you bite into your taco. You have piles of art supplies, fabric, woodworking tools, dance shoes, or beads waiting for you.
Ever been told that you were flaky for being this way? Or that you needed to pick one thing to do for the rest of your life? That stuff comes from an outdated industrial-age way of thinking that saw people as needing to be really specific and specialized. That specialization is great if you’re a worker on an assembly line turning one bolt over and over, but it’s not as relevant to the way that work and careers are changing, or the way that they will be in the future. We have computers and robots and AI to do that bolt-turning now, and what we’ll need more and more are the human soft skills (like empathy), creativity and synthesis of ideas that aren’t easily replicated by AI.
The good news? That’s where multipassionate people like us shine.
That’s not to say that we don’t need help or that we can’t do this better. Here are three ways you can make the most of your magnificent multipassionate spirit.
Step One: Log It
When your mind is full of ideas and potential projects, not to mention keeping track of what needs to be done next on which project, it can get stressful and exhausting. But we also don’t want to lose track of that good stuff!
So start yourself an idea log. Figure out a format that fits your style—using one of the dozens of beautiful blank notebooks you have lying around (or is that just me?) if you’re a paper-and-pen person, tracking them on Google Sheets/Docs or Evernote if you like tech…any way that you can have the idea, jot it down, and move along. That frees up attention because you’re no longer worried about forgetting the idea.
Step Two: Sort It
Now that your ideas have a home, it’s a lot easier to go through them and see which ones grab your interest. Remember, not all relationships are the same! There might be some ideas that would be fun side projects on a weekend but aren’t anything that you’d want to make into a career or business—and that is 100% okay! Not all of your ideas are nesting partners or forever friends. You can still have a great time together.
In this step, come up with categories of ideas. These can be anything that make sense to you: “have to do,” “nice to do,” “will die inside a little if I don’t do,” “maybe one day,” whatever you like.
Now sort the ideas that you dumped onto your list into those categories. Guess what? It’s also totally okay if they shift over time, so forget about perfection.
Step Three: Prioritize It
Feeling overwhelmed yet? Not sure where to start….or wanting to start on all of them at once? I’ve got something for that.
Hop on over here, and you can download my free fillable and printable PDF Getting Focused Workbook that takes you through a series of questions to help you narrow down where to start. You can reuse it over and over again each time you want to prioritize tasks. (You can even use it with less exciting stuff, like your adulting to-do list.)
I think it’s really nice to use it at the beginning of each month or week to figure out what to focus on during that time period. I’d love to hear how you use it and how it works for you!
If you want more personalized help getting going on your creative ideas—and the accountability, tools, and strategy you need to make real, visible, for-real progress on them—you can learn more about me and my mission to help weird people do more cool stuff at www.drjoeckler.com
