I recently realised there were a number of things I wanted to be working on, and that trying to juggle them without some kind of organisation wasn't going to happen for me.

I want to do many things, but I have a list of more immediate items in my head. I want to work on learning about synth concepts and my new synth. I want to work on consistent content creation. I want to get back to learning Python programming. I want to get back to open source project contributions. I want to continue with my hobbies such as knitting. Altogether, this is entirely too much to simply have happen. It was going to take some deliberate action on my part. So, I set about sorting out getting myself organised.

To start, these are, combined, a lot to deal with. Even individually, they're pretty big. So the first step was to break them each down into more finite pieces. This involved identifying what each thing might consist of, and choosing a smaller piece to start with. Most of my goals were relatively straightforward to break down.

For synth bits, it's a big, huge synthy world out there, and there's so much to learn. However, I had a brand new synthesiser, and a synth course I had purchased over the holidays. So, it was pretty obvious to me that I would start with my synth course, and work on the concepts I learn in the course on my new synth. A friend shared a synth concept book with me and the manual for my new synth is thorough and well written, so finding my newly learned concepts and applying them to my synth seemed like it would work pretty well.

For Python, there are an infinite number of options. That said, I recently completed an intro to Python course that came with a year's subscription to Python Morsels. So, this one narrowed itself down pretty easily, other than picking a cadence. I decided I would work through a programming exercise on Python Morsels each weekday.

For project work, I had already begun contributing to a specific project, and had stepped away due to other priorities taking hold. So, I already knew the what, but I needed to figure out the when. How much bandwidth did I have to offer? Initially, I settled on an hour per week, on Friday afternoons, but I realised that would make it difficult to communicate with the project lead who lives in Australia and would be starting his weekend at that point. So, I added sometime on Mondays, which meant I would spend time twice per week working on my contribution.

For knitting, I already had a project in progress. For a while, I was knitting every day, but some of this came out of needing to spend time in the living room supervising a trio of troublesome kittens. As I started spending more time at my desk again, I found myself doing it less and less, which is what led to me deciding to add it to the mix of deliberate tasks. Chronologically speaking, this was added to my list after already sorting out everything else, which meant my weekdays, at least, were already kind of full. So, to not overwhelm myself, knitting would happen on weekends.

Then, there was content creation. This one was the biggest and most daunting, and is the best illustration of what goes into breaking something big into bite-sized pieces. My content choice was quite broad, leaving me with room to share whatever interesting thing I'm learning at the time, along with programming and electronics projects, which was deliberate on my part, but did mean it made it more difficult to narrow things down. One of the most important concepts in content creation is consistent publishing, however, that involves having content to publish. I have a few in-progress projects that are rather large, and a lot of smaller ideas for posts, but choosing publishing as the "goal" still wasn't reasonable, as it still contained too many moving parts. It was a huge part of the goal, though, so I needed to figure out how to get there. After a lot of consideration, I concluded that I would start with writing every day. I decided if I write something worth publishing, I'll publish it. If I don't, I won't. For now, the important thing, was to get into the habit of writing. In my mind, this will organically lead to publishing. Whether this happens or not, it is still something I can build on, which is exactly what I need to start.

Now that I had my tangible, "reasonable" goals sorted out, I needed to figure out how to ensure I would actually begin and continue doing the tasks. I have a task tracker app, but too much going on in there eventually becomes noise, so I try to limit it to items that a single reminder during the day is enough to trigger it happening. This didn't fit that for me. So, I decided to give my calendar a try. Obviously this won't work for everyone. I keep multiple calendars already, for various topics: personal, work, shared, household, etc. Therefore, creating separate calendars for Goals, Hobbies, and Scheduling (which I'll explain in a bit) made sense to me. I created recurring tasks for each goal and hobby, in their respective calendars, at reasonable times on the days I intended to engage with them.

This method obviously takes nothing else scheduled into account. That is where Scheduling comes in. The first of each month, I set aside time to go through the events of that month, and move my goals and hobbies around to fit with other things I have scheduled. It took me less than 10 minutes for February, to shift around a month's worth of events to handle other events. The idea with this whole process is to start somewhere, and be flexible where needed. Most days, I'm able to shift everything around a bit to accommodate my schedule. Some days, I have enough other events scheduled that I don't try to also plan to get to all of my goals that day. In those cases, I choose what to prioritise, and delete the rest.

I'm finding that setting aside time in my calendar for each goal has been mostly a positive thing for me. There's the sometimes frustrating part of it where I have to accept when I don't get to the goals listed in my calendar. I definitely haven't managed to keep up every day. Mostly for my own information, I've kept up with removing calendar events if I don't get to the thing on a given day. It provides a helpful visual that means I can glance at my calendar and see how I've been doing, versus guessing or remembering (hah! ADHD much?) what I did over the last week. So, really, the future calendar events are serving as reminders to do the tasks, and the past calendar events are my actual progress.

The few days in a row in the beginning that I got to everything felt amazing and smooth, but that didn't last, which was expected, but still frustrating. It turns out momentum is absolutely apparently a necessary thing for me. When I keep up with things, I find it much easier to keep doing them. When there's a gap where I don't get to things, I'm finding it quite difficult to jump back in. I probably could have told you this before I started this endeavor, but there's definitely evidence to back it up at this point. I've mostly kept up with writing, and it's been the easiest one to continue keeping up with. Everything else has had several day gaps, and picking any of them back up after the gap has been a struggle. This leads to a feedback loop, wherein I'm frustrated for missing it the day, or days, before, and then end up frustrated that I can't bring myself to get past the mental block to do it today. That quickly becomes yesterday, and the situation repeats. The longer the gap, the harder it is for me to restart. This is something I am working on, but other than "do the thing", I don't have any life-changing advice here. Yet.

That said, there is one thing that has pretty consistently helped me: external accountability and support. I have friends who are helping me learn some of these things, and others who are learning some of these things along with me. I need to remember to lean into that for motivation. My ADHD means that if there's not an external deadline or motivator, the thing doesn't happen. I can procrastinate with the best of them, and setting my own deadlines does nothing for me. If there's no consequence for failing to keep up, then my brain pretty much writes off the need to do so. Now, what qualifies as a "consequence" is probably different for me than it is for you, and than it is for anyone else. There are obvious consequences, such as those that come from failing to submit a talk to a conference before the end of the CFP, turn in a paper in a course at university, or make it to an appointment on time. For me, though, there are less obvious ones, such as those that come from letting down someone to whom I feel like I've made a commitment. That feeling can come from a whole range of things, beginning with simply telling someone I'm going to do a thing. Sometimes it comes from accepting tangible support, such as accepting an offer for help with a thing, especially when the person is excited about providing the support or assistance. There's obviously the flip side here to be careful of, which is getting down on myself for letting them down if I don't follow through, but the positive effect of motivation I get from it outweighs the amount of effort needed to avoid the negative side.

If this all sounds like you, my advice here is to seek out folks who can hold you accountable in a way that works for you, and folks that are interested in helping you with whatever task you're working on. These folks can be anyone, from close friends, to folks you might meet in a new community you join related to your situation. The internet can be a fantastic and terrible place, and leaning into the fantastic has done wonders for me. I have friends all over the world, and I've joined great communities related to my goals and hobbies. Remember that your friend is another individual human with individual-human-level bandwidth, and be cognisant of what they can reasonably offer you. The great thing about communities is that they typically consist of multiple humans that have a much larger combined bandwidth. For me, telling a friend that I'm going to do a thing, and having them be excited for me, is sometimes enough of a motivator to do the thing. As well, telling a community that I'm going to do a thing, and having anyone be excited for me, is sometimes enough. More than that though, having others be interested in or interested in being involved in the thing... That's a bigger motivator for me. I'm lucky to have friends who are interested in learning and teaching the things I'm interested in learning. However, I still engage with communities for further support.

It's been a bit over two weeks since I filled out my calendar and jumped into this. So far, I've managed to get to at least one thing on all but one (rather busy) weekday, and nothing on the weekends. I did get to some things I'd been putting off for ages over the weekends, so I still felt productive, even though I didn't get to the tasks listed on my calendar. After giving it some thought, I realised that perhaps the main, overarching goal here is to simply feel productive. I became chronically ill at the end of December 2023 in a way that robbed me of energy to do much of anything. It took months of adapting to reach a point where I could function and engage with my life within my limitations. Initially, it was hard to feel like I was doing much of anything, because in the grand scheme of things, I wasn't. I had to work very hard to change my perception of what "doing things" meant, and to accept that it had to be very different from what it was before this happened. Changing my perception, though, did not really change my desire to be doing things. I've had to very carefully figure out what I can do and when, and be prepared for those plans to go out the window if I end up with a difficult day. So realising that I had a large list of goals, hobbies, and projects I wanted to be working on, meant I needed to figure out how to make it happen within these limitations, and keep my expectations of myself reasonable. That's what brought me here, and I feel like I am managing to do this so far. Despite failing to keep up with my listed tasks, I have felt productive every day since I began, and I'm working on letting that be enough.

I wanted to share my entire situation here to ensure that if you try the same thing and are not completely succeeding, you know you're not alone. I think the biggest key here is to reframe what success looks like, and be ok with it not being what you might have initially expected. The fact that I started all of this in the first place is a pretty big success in itself. That I'm still engaging with it two and a half weeks later is even bigger. So even though I'm not consistently keeping up with the individual pieces, I'll still give myself that the overall plan seems to be working out thus far.