How to declutter the bunch of stuff you want to do at the same time?

I've decided to start my journey here on dev.to with this post.
Since a few months ago I've been thinking about so many things I'd like to do, but then again, I've just been thinking and not really making my dreams come true.

And that's just been because my time had started draining into other things. Last year, 2018, was an awesome year for me, but it was a life changing year for me as well.

2018 journey

awesome study year

1. I met my closest friends from college, who are also colleagues in the same field of study (Computer Science), so much better
2. I met new friends who became close friends too
3. Started full-time working as a web developer for a company few months before graduating
4. Graduated from college
5. Learnt a lot new things on web development flow and docker containers
6. Learnt and got experience with React.js, ES6, HTML5, CSS3 in particular
7. Could rest a little from the constant project working and studying within college
8. Reached my dream of traveling to a different country for vacation
9. I participated in 2018’s hacktoberfest and earned the 5-PR contribution gift, partnered by DigitalOcean, Github, Docker and Twilio
10. Got focused on studying Japanese again

life changing year

1. Entered the adult life of paying bills xD
2. Now it's not college but the job the one that takes most of my time
3. Got to get up too early every day (I still don't get used to)
4. Arrive too tired at home so I don't focus on my personal projects
5. Problems managing my time an set up my schedule and stick to it
6. Got stressed because there are too many things and projects I want to work on or be part of, or habits I want to stick to my day to day

As you can see, 2018 was a great year for me but after all that I had a moment were I got stressed, really stressed, As I thought when college was over I'd have more time to spend on my real dreams and passions, but it wasn't true at all.

By every day I was trying to:

- read at least one chapter of a book before work
- do my work as front-end developer in my job
- study at least 30mins of Japanese Vocabulary (I ended up studying more than an hour)
- practice my listening skill of English by watching at least a chapter of any series
- study/practice at least 30mins of Kanji
- study/practice 1 or 2 hours of Japanese grammar
- do at least 1 hour of swimming sport 
- go to the gym / work out
- go to the church (we've meetings everyday, its name is: The Light of the World)
- work on a personal project to improve my skills with Angular
- make a personal web portfolio
- make a personal project for improving my react native skills
- make a personal project for improving my compilers knowledge
- create a personal indie game and publish it
- learn unity
- contribute to opensource projects like Rosalila Engine
- learn Haskell better
- create and publish an npm module
- practice guitar
- read a book before sleep

Obviously I always ended the day frustrated because I couldn't be committed to all that stuff in a day, I just ended doing ones more than others or nothing at all.

But then I realized the actual issue was I was trying to do everything at the same time, so because of that I was feeling I had no time in the day for completing everything I wanted do.

I still got a huge list of TO DO things in Trello, but now I just decided to make goals for each one and start completing them one by one or at least a few ones by every month.

The key is just to start by prioritizing the ones you love, the ones you believe in, but one by one without getting your responsibilities out.

I will start to contribute to opensource projects from little changes to meaningful ones in an increasing way, and I recognized too that I support open source community by writing posts and helping people in forums, chat channels, video tutorials and stuff like that.

thanks for reading and wish me luck on the journey! ;)

Comments

[Fernando B 🚀]

You're not alone in this regard. I see tons of people on Twitter saying I've done x, now, I'm doing, y, now I'm onto z. All within hours. People think they can multi-task by completing so many tasks quickly without giving full attention to a particular task.

At least you recognized that is better to prioritize. One thing that helps me is to mark things in the calendar. Also for big side projects is better to break down into smaller achievable chunks. i.e. I will make a social app. vs Step 1 login, Step 2 Posts, Step 3 Feed, etc.

[Kevin J. Estevez]

Thanks, Yeah, I realized I'd never finished anything if I continued trying to do everything at the same time.

I started braking the big side projects down into smaller achievable chunks.

Will try to mark things in the calendar too.

[Avery]

I like to track things I've finished as well, planned or not. We're all doing more than we think and tracking it helps me from feeling lazy and motivates me to keep making progress.

It also helps you when it's time to prepare for an interview, negotiate a raise etc.

[Kevin J. Estevez]

you mean adding new features and refactoring code after a project is done?

[Pritesh Usadadiya]

The thing works for me is to divide one task into multiple smaller ones and go through them one by one.

Don't try to do everything at once. it never works(not in the long term at-least).

[Kevin J. Estevez]

sure that's better, so when you divide into multiple smaller ones, what is the common flow you use to get through?

[Pritesh Usadadiya]

what is the common flow you use to get through?

Well it's differs form task to task but let me give you a recent example,

Task : I need to create a personal website using Hugo (i had no idea of how this works , never configured sub domains and email forwarding)

Divided into the smaller one :

1. Get general understanding of framework (high level flow only like project structure)
2. select Theme
3. Edit it and customize it with css
4. Buy domain
   • Configure sub domain
   • Configure Email forwarding
5. Push project to github
6. Redirect to the custom domain.

When divided to smaller task, Load becomes much easier to handle and you go from top to bottom one by one without randomly jumping from one to another :)

Hope this helps :)

[Kevin J. Estevez]

sure, I'll try it

thanks for sharing! :D