The Tangent: Too Many Projects

Welcome to the first issue of “The Tangent” which is just a silly name I’m using to give myself an excuse to talk about whatever I want.

If you only want the more focused ADHD strategies and topics, you’ll still get those every Tuesday. The Tangent will likely be a bit more sporadic when I feel like I have something interesting to talk about (which may or may not always be ADHD-specific).

You can edit your notifications at extrafocus.com/account to control what you see.

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So I’ve been building a lot of things lately.

In addition to completely redoing my ADHD course website, I’ve also been working on an app for staying in touch with friends and family, a writing app, a bluesky app, a video editing app, a baseball tracking menubar, an email client, a utility to control my AC unit, and I’m even learning a new programming language (Godot) to build a video game with my kids.

Oh, plus I have a family and a full-time job and I’m an author trying to spread the word about my book (and a second?) and a speaker and I do a couple of really cool podcasts (the latest, ADHD Live, has been super fun!) and more things I’m sure...

It’s a lot.

It’s always been a lot, that’s just how I’ve always lived my life.

But lately, it doesn’t quite feel the same.

In the past, I would have these crazy new ideas and I would get excited about them and maybe tell someone about them and then the dopamine would wear off and I could just sort of forget about that crazy idea that didn’t pan out.

I’d stick it in the drawer and forget about it for a year or two and that would be fine. I might feel guilty about abandoning that good idea, but it was usually little more than a good idea (and some purchased supplies) so letting it fade didn’t feel like I was losing too much.

It’s different now.

I know not everyone is into AI, and every individual is making their own decisions for how and where they choose to use AI in their life. As someone that has been building websites and apps for last couple of decades or so, I’ve found it pretty incredible to see how I can use this powerful tool to go from an idea into something completely usable in rapid time.

Features that used to take me months can often be built in a single hyperfocused afternoon.

And that’s really cool!

But also, it’s created a bit of a headache for me, because like many people with ADHD, I have so many good ideas and now they can very quickly be built into a real thing. Once it feels like a real piece of software, it becomes a lot harder to just let it fade away in a drawer.

This recent quote by Matt Pocock (a developer and online educator) really sums up a lot of how things feel right now:

Never been easier to feel busy and ship nothing
Stay focused

That’s the danger right now. Just like hyperfocus has always been—when I’m in the moment it’s easy to feel like I’m being super productive. But often once I’m free of the hyperfocus haze, I can finally see that I wasn’t actually making progress on anything worthwhile.

Okay, so you aren’t going to believe this.

In my infinite wisdom, I’ve decided that I’m going to fix this problem by… building another tool to help manage this.

This new tool’s primary focus is to help me manage what projects I’m working on, so things I think are important (like working on this game with my kids) don’t slip through the cracks because I got thrown off by some shiny distraction.

It’s helping me stay on target for the stuff I want to complete.

The focus isn’t output, it’s attention.

I’m not trying to build yet-another-supposedly-perfect-productivity-system, I’m just trying to keep tabs on which projects I’ve been paying attention to and which have started to fade.

Once I see a project fading, I can make a conscious decision of whether it is still deserving of my attention, or if I should shelve it for the time being.

I’ve been using it for about a month and it’s become my daily morning and evening routine to just check in and journal about where I’m at with various projects.

It’s already helped me decide that a couple of my projects were more of a distraction than anything, so I shelved them for now. Maybe I’ll pick one of them up again at a later date, maybe not. But now it’s released from my attention, I’m no longer feeling guilty for “another thing I abandoned” because I didn’t abandon it. I simply made a decision for where my attention was most valuable for now, and put it on the shelf.

I’m not sure yet if I’m going to release it or just keep it as an internal tool for my own use. But having something to help combat the “I’m starting new things every day just because I can” has been immensely helpful in feeling like I have a grasp on what is going on.

Are you feeling any of this way? I’d love to hear from you, either in the comments below or just email me directly. It’s always good to feel like you aren’t alone.

Thanks for reading.

— Jesse

P.S. I’m super excited to share that next week I’m speaking at the ADHD Growth Summit, put on by my friends at Shimmer! I’ll be on the Late Dx: A Lived Experience Panel talking about what it was like getting diagnosed as an adult, and mourning “what could have been” if only I’d known sooner.

There are a ton of other great talks available from some of the best speakers in the ADHD space. You can sign up here to check it out.