Organizing Projects as a Multi-Passionate Creative
Posted on January 8, 2025 by Aywren
It was all of a couple days ago that I discovered a new term for what I am – a multi-passionate creative. In a nutshell, this means I pick up many hobbies, explore many creative avenues, and have way too many projects going at one time.
If you’ve been around here for any stretch of this blog’s lifetime, you’ll likely know that I juggle too many creative endeavors for my own good. I’m always on the lookout to find some new craft or hobby to explore and learn because… well, to me, learning something new and diving in deep is exciting!
There is a down side to this, which I’ve been struggling with since sometime last year when I found myself overwhelmed by the number of activities I wanted to check off in a day. There just weren’t enough hours for everything. Sure, I could list all the things out on paper, order them by priority and cut the things that aren’t necessary – that makes sense. But what happens when none of my projects are something I want to abandon?
I’ve spent the last few days focusing on the question of – If I don’t want to let go of any of the projects I have, how do I organize things so that I can make progress on them all? (While still having fun doing it…)
The Struggle
As the interests pile up, I find myself struggling to do all the things I want to do in the limited time I have. I also start to struggle with my sense of identity when it comes to social and creative circles.
Am I a blogger? A webcomic artist? A fantasy fiction writer? An indie web coder? A gamer? A guild leader? An analogue explorer? A reader? A fiddle player? A tech geek? A traditional artist? A digital artist? A crafter? A music lover?
Even a look at my social media profiles will display a bullet list of things I enjoy.
While having a wide range of interests is fun and not a bad thing, it does make it hard to spend time on honing just one area. That’s why this blog is lumped under the “Gaming and Geek” topic – it allows me to not to shove this blog into a niche because anything I geek out about can fall under “Geek”.
It’s sometimes hard to prioritize and put focus into each of the projects in a way that helps them flourish. There are some projects that I do that require networking, interacting, and spending time outside of the creative part. For example, growing a social media account requires time spent chatting and interacting with others, not just posting to the account.
Blocking Time and Sprint Solutions
After doing a little research and watching some videos on the topic – in which I first heard the term multi-passionate creative – I took away a few ideas that I think will be helpful to me. Ironically, the concept is one that we use in my workplace, often called a Sprint.
For those not familiar with the idea of Sprints in software project management, the official definition is:
A sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.
Atlassian
While this usually applies to a software team working in weekly or bi-weekly cadences to ship software, this concept can be adjusted to just about anything. So, here’s what I’m trying.
Blocking Days
On each of the weekdays, I choose a specific focus. For example:
- Mondays – Fantasy Writing
- Tuesdays – Traditional Arts/Crafting
- Wednesday – Wayrift Webcomic
- Thursdays – Small Website Coding Projects or Maintenance
- Fridays – Gaming/FFXIV/Free Day
It’s not so much that I won’t do other things on these days, but that on these days, I need to allot a specific amount of time towards making progress on something that falls under the topic’s umbrella.
How It Works
Imagine it’s Thursday. This is the day I spend time working on coding some of my backlogged projects for my blog.
One of these projects is updating my Breyer Horse section with some of the newest models I’ve collected. I’ve not set aside the time to work on this because I’ve been trying to do everything else instead - this is actually one of the projects I want to work on, so this example is real.
Well, because it’s Thursday, and small coding projects is the theme of that day, I might set a goal to code one page about one model horse and get that published. Something like that might only take an hour or less to do.
It’s still something I keep procrastinating on because everything else seems to be more important. But because I told myself that this was my focus for the day, and everything else can wait, I actually make progress on doing something I’ve been putting off.
Everything gets a turn, and has time to get focused on. Other things can wait until the focused item is complete.
Then, weekends are free for whatever inspiration I have. I made sure to leave weekends un-themed to give myself a breather and not lock myself into too rigid a schedule.
The Sprint Jar
Now for the Sprints. In this case, a Sprint is a focus that changes each week. I set a small goal to achieve during this time frame and attempt to do my best to get as much done around that focus.
For example, this week’s sprint is blogging. My goal is to write a blog post each weekday of this week. So far, I’ve done a good job of that. Once the weekend rolls around, blog posts are optional, though it would be nice to have a full week of daily blogging under my belt to kick off this experiment.
Come next Monday, the focus changes. Next week is all about FFXIV. My plan is to nudge myself back into daily content such as Frontlines and Society quests. I want to get back on the leveling path and make some progress in my PVP series.
The week after that, my sprint focus is diamond painting. The week after that, Steam gaming.
So how am I choosing what my weekly focus will be? Simple! I created a Sprint Jar.
I wrote out a bunch of focus topics on slips of paper.
I then folded them up and put them in a little glass jar.
From there, I randomly drew the topics. The only rule is that I don’t do the same topic more than once in a month. I want each week to be something random and different to keep it interesting.
This allows me to change things up each week while still making progress on things that are important to me. Will I still write blog posts on my FFXIV focused week? Sure. I just want to try to spend a little time each day working on the focused Sprint area – and that might look different for each topic.
I doubt I’ll play a new Steam game each day of the Steam sprint, for example. But I might try to do something like try two new games from my backlog that week – or focus on making progress on a Steam game I’m close to finishing. FFIV is a good example – I’m on the final dungeon of the pixel remaster and I keep meaning to sit down and finish it. In fact, I think that’s what I’ll do come Steam Gaming week this month.
See? I find this both exciting and liberating in a weird way.
All I needed was to explore a different kind of structure. And of course, I’m keeping tabs on how this works out in my hand-written journals and my traveler’s notebook planner.
I’ll let you know how it went at the end of this month, and if I will continue the experiment!