How compartmentalisation can lead to overwhelm
An overwhelmed writer is not a productive writer.
A little bit of housekeeping: Ada Lovelace Day is just a few weeks away on 8 October, so I’ll be pausing this newsletter whilst I focus on preparing for our awesome event at the Royal Institution in London (tickets available now to come along in person or watch online!). The next newsletter should land in your inboxes on 30 November!
It seems apropos, given the note above, to talk about compartmentalisation and how it can very easily, and very sneakily, lead to overwork and overwhelm.
I recently had a conversation with Dan Oshinksy who runs the Inbox Collective newsletter consultancy. Our chat was, ostensibly, about what I should do with the Ada Lovelace Day newsletter, but by the end of the hour — after I’d detailed all the work that goes in to ALD, talked a bit about my two writing newsletters, and explained that I’m also currently writing a sitcom, oh and also trying to spin up a media consultancy — he had one major piece of advice. As soon as he said it, I knew it was true.
I need to do less.
How did I get to this point of having so many active projects on the go?
Some of it is financial insecurity. Ada Lovelace Day brought in enough to keep me fed and watered when we lived in the American Midwest, where the cost of living is low. Here in the UK, within spitting distance of London and after various price shocks and cost of living/energy crises, it just doesn’t pull in enough cash to keep me going.
Some of it is that I’m trying to pivot my career. I’ve always wanted to write for a living, and for a while as a journalist I did. But I have spent a lot of time not writing (hence this newsletter!) and it was only when I was staring my 50th birthday in the face that I realised I didn’t have time to wait. I had to prioritise my writing. Which means I have to spend time on it.
Turning writing into a revenue stream, though, is a slow and laborious process. As much as I love my two newsletters, neither are going to start paying appreciable sums any time soon. And it’s going to be a while before Fieldwork is ready for me to start crowdfund podcast production.
So what with writing not paying and ALD not paying enough, something else is going to have to step in to pay the bills. Which is why I’m now looking to spin up some media consulting.
The only way for me to work on multiple projects at once is to compartmentalise. When I’m writing my newsletters, I’m writing my newsletters. When I’m working on Ada Lovelace Day, I’m working on Ada Lovelace Day.
Because of this, it’s easy to focus too tightly on what’s happening with each project in isolation and fail to look at them all as a group. The workload for each project can escalate, without me realising, because it doesn’t feel like too much work for that specific project. But put together, and suddenly there’s just not enough time in the day nor room in my brain.
And thus arrives a creeping sense of overwhelm, rolling in like heavy sea fog.
I now realise very clearly that I am doing too many different things. Yet I’m not getting paid enough. Something’s going to have to give. But what?
That is what I’ll be thinking very hard about after Ada Lovelace Day. Previously in my life, when I’ve had this same problem of overwhelm, my writing has bitten the dust. This time round, I’m managing (more or less) to keep Fieldwork moving forward despite feeling a bit overwhelmed. But I won’t be able to keep it going if I don’t make changes elsewhere. Exactly what those changes are, we’ll have to see.