Juggling multiple projects

[sarillia]

How do you handle this? Do you work on one thing at a time or are you always working on several? Do you have one dominant one and other ones you add to on the side or is your time split equally among them?

I'm about to start Camp NaNoWriMo next week and I'm not sure if I will be done with my current project before then, so I'm trying to decide what I should do.

There are a lot of aspects of writing where I feel like I've figured out what works best for me after a lot of experimenting. This is not one of them. I can think of times when seeing one project through to the end worked well and other times when alternating between several served me well. I guess I tend to go back and forth between those methods.

Comments

[inkdust]

I cannot, cannot, cannot multitask. I'm still struggling to accept this fact in my daily life for inconsequential things (like trying to read fandom secrets and watch tv at the same time) but for writing I do not fight this. I have to throw myself full-on into whatever I choose to work on, so only one project can occupy that place.

At the moment, I'm starting to play around with one of my next ideas while I wait for feedback on my finished draft, but I feel sure that as soon as I have more editing to do, the new idea will be pushed to the back burner again. I just get hyper-focused, and trying to split that between more than one thing doesn't work.

Have you noticed any pattern of what type of projects you were working on when you concentrated on one vs tackled several at once?

[sarillia]

I seem to be becoming more and more like you as time goes by. I used to be really good at multitasking but now I'm increasingly finding myself preferring a really deep focus on one thing.

I've been thinking about any kind of pattern there might be and I might have something. I think it's the projects where I felt like I knew what I was doing that I was able to work on several at once. The times when I hadn't done as much planning and I was figuring everything out as I went along were the ones that required me to focus more on them because I was trying to keep everything straight in my head.

[inkdust]

That makes a lot of sense. There's such a difference between having some kind of outline you feel sure about and working from one point to the next versus feeling like you're juggling a bunch of pieces that you have to keep adjusting and checking and questioning. I think I experience more of the latter.