have you ever tried to juggle multiple interests and skills but ended up feeling overwhelmed and not making progress in any of them you're not alone especially in today's world where everyone seems to show off their skills on social media I know exactly how it feels I've juggled a demanding full-time job as a consultant maintain a social life play piano trade in Combat Sports hit the gym and went Bing it was overwhelming but I have discovered effective strategies on exactly how to manage my interest and skills while still making significant PR ress in each of them
without feeling overwhelmed stick around because by the end of this video you'll have a clear road map to manage your interest and skills effectively let's first take a look at why having or wanting too many skills is dangerous in the first place wanting and keeping up with too many skills is only going to slow you down or worst case make you stand still by wanting too much and keeping up with too much you're going to spread yourself too thin you just end up with small insignificant advances in many areas instead of substantial progress in fewer
I like to look at it like this energy ball if you have too many skills and interest your energy gets divided into tiny arrows each barely making an impact but if you concentrate on just one you're going to have a long and Powerful Arrow driving significant progress now I don't think this energy bow is a binary concept with only two sides it is more of a scale you can focus on two skills and make significant progress though not as much as with just one but the further to the left to go the shorter and less
impactful your progress arrows become and it's going to come to a point where the arrows become too short and insignificant to give you a practical example of this I once juggled a demanding full-time job as a consultant trained the combat sport Brazilian jiu-jitsu IT strengthened training bouldered attended Toast Masters and tried to maintain my social life I was focusing on too much felt overwhelmed and ended up not making any significant progress in any of them in other words I was too far left on the scale now I found a really clever strategy to being able
to learn and progress the skills and interest that you want a strategy that can be adjusted to anyone's preferences but before we dive into the strategies let's talk about prioritization before moving on I just want to quickly mention my free newsletter if you want to dive even deeper into self-improvement Concepts get my free notion templates for a limited time or just get to know me better join my free newsletter that is linked below now let's get back to the video we all know that we can't do everything that's why we need to prioritize many people
avoid prioritizing and hope things will work out on their own but this only leads to feeling overwhelmed and unclear about your goals these feelings are going to linger in the back of your mind throughout your day and life and can easily lead to procrastination as vagueness is a common cause for procrastination to combat this you need Clarity and an easy way to gain Clarity is to write down your prioritization list so here's an exercise write down 5 to 10 skills and interest interest that you would like to have and rank them by importance we'll build
on this exercise later to understand the strategies of how to effectively manage your skills we first need to understand concepts of maintaining and building maintaining refers to the minimal effort required to maintain your current skill level without improving or decaying building refers to the effort required to effectively increase your current skill level we all know that there is a difference between the time and effort required to effectively progress in a skill where interest versus just maintaining it what most people Overlook is how big this difference can be for example maintaining your Fitness might mean going
to the gym twice a week whereas effectively building your muscles could require five sessions a week the next exercise is to find your maintenance levels and building levels for all the skills you wrote down on your prioritization list I made a previous video on how to find your exact levels which you can check out here later but for the sake of the video let's keep moving think in terms of sessions per week don't overthink it too much we're just going to give rough estimates we can always adjust later an example of this could be similar
to what I just mentioned that to effectively build your phys you might need to go to the gym five times a week for 45 minutes each while two times a week for 45 minutes each might be enough to maintain your physique another example is with piano you might need three 1hour sessions a week to effectively progress while 20 minutes every other day could be enough to maintain it again don't overthink it it's just a rough estimate and we can always adjust later finally we can start to talk about strategies let's look back at our scale
on the far right we had one long arrow for a single focus and on the left we had many short insignificant arrows I personally prefer to be as far right on the scale as possible the strategy that suits this style is to keep all skills and interest at maintenance levels while using all the freedom of energy on one skill that you want massively level up it now this is just my style but it's also what I've seen actually works the best for other people too with that said it's definitely possible to have a strategy more
suited towards the middle of the scale this strategy will focus on not just one skill but a few let's use five as an example so you can choose the top five from your prioritization list while you won't have the long line for all five you would still have a significant long line for all of them this is where understanding your maintenance and building levels is crucial to actually focus on five skills and interest you have to have the energy to keep up with the sum of the five building levels you identified for the five skills
how do you know if you have the energy you put them in the calendar and test it you already estimated the building levels for your five skills now you want to schedule them in your calendar you might find that there is enough space in your calendar to perfectly fit all the building levels for all your five skills you might even find that you have more room in your calendar in that case can consider adding one more skill skill from your paration list more realistically though you might find that you don't have room for all your
five skills and that you actually have to cut one [Music] out at this point we only given first rough estimates for the building levels for our skills and we have scheduled them in the calendar but we don't actually know anything for sure until we test it out in the real world only after testing it out for one or 2 weeks you can start adjusting maybe you had a too high estimation for the building level for one skill and too low for another maybe you find that you had the right estimation for all your skills and
had the time in your calendar but actually didn't have the energy this is something you have to continuously test and adjust each week and if you want to dive deeper on exactly how to do this I'll link the previous video here again [Music]
