“I think so, in Europe.”

You know that moment when you almost break down? That moment where you realize how spread thin you are and you aren’t certain if you are going to be able to pull everything together? Welcome to about four hours ago for me. Thankfully the extent of breaking down was to drive down the road to grab some lunch at John and Sons. I probably shouldn’t have bought lunch because it turns out there was an email sent out that we had extra pizza about an hour after I finished my salad, but drive was helpful in clearing my mind for a few moments.

My mind has been preoccupied with all of the projects that I am currently working on that I haven’t really been able to even start looking at them. Aside from all of the projects that are overwhelming me at work, I have plenty of personal projects that I am working on and it is usually these projects that I end up losing focus of. I’ve been working on a website for my rental property for a long time but I never seem to make more than some minimal progress with it. I operate a Syracuse sports website titled Get Gross Out which is dedicated to the removal of Daryl Gross as the Athletics Director, but I still haven’t found the time to dedicate to the cause. Other than a brief mention of the Greg Robinson firing, I really haven’t updated the site in about a month. And I have a new project that I want to focus on dealing with sustainability and green development, but I have yet to really find a direction to take.

I think the root of the problem, thanks to a conversation with one of my best friends, Jen, is that I have the big picture viewpoint that I chastise management types for. I am looking at this broad vision of all of these projects coming to fruition, but I am not appropriately setting goals and proceeding in a logical manner. Her suggestion to me is one that I use for many other aspects of my life, but for some reason I wasn’t able to carry it over to my projects. She suggested to make a shortlist of goals, essentially the projects that I want to complete. Then, to expand the list by breaking down each of the projects into their smaller parts and writing those down with time frames for completion. This is something I already do with my budget (you do not want to see my spreadsheet…) and it is something that I do with projects at work, but for some reason I never made the correlation to do it with my personal projects.

Hopefully, armed with that suggestion, I can go home this evening and make some real progress on all of the projects that have been waiting for me to start.