The cost of a new project

Decisions stemming from fear and avoiding burnout

Why do “people on a crosswalk” pictures work well with everything?

I stare blankly at my Google doc while the text cursor “|” blinks back at me, taunting me to write a sentence, a word, anything. My essay outline bullets across my screen. It usually just takes touching my laptop keys to turn ideas into prose.

So why am I stuck?

I groan, the low and loud kind that is deep, frustrated, and tired. I know what this is: paralysis from having too much to do. A reeking stubbornness of I can do it all.

The to-do list in my leather notebook says that I still need to hang my running shorts on the drying rack, cook shredded chicken for dinner, and shoot a YouTube video of my fountain pens. I’ve contemplated pausing my YouTube activities for a while, but I worry that I may not get back to it. This weekly publishing momentum took two years to build.

And next week, I’m joining Write of Passage’s 11th cohort as an editor. This will be a 5-week stint with dozens of essays to plough through.

I’m overwhelmed. I need to reflect on my resources (time and energy) and make some changes.

Budgeting energy

I find it helpful to rank my priorities based on energy, which is what “takes the most out of me” instead of time, which is just a matter of execution. Time management can be solved by calendar blocking, but energy is what we “have in the tank”.

My priorities (by energy) are as follows:

1. Full-time job (non-negotiable. This is what I have committed to when I signed my employment contract. Plus, this covers my bills)

2. Health (mind, body and soul). This includes working out, cooking healthy meals, and allocating time for my relationships (my partner and my friends)

3. This Substack (publish weekly)

4. My YouTube / art (publish weekly)

This list puts my current “major activities” in perspective. I need to maintain this list and not grow it.

The lowest priority (YouTube) is a strong candidate to being replaced by slotting in being a WOP editor on the list, at least for the five weeks of the course. But I’m scared of making this call.

The fear

Though it technically is temporary, a pause and an end look similar from the outside. Getting momentum back is tricky, because it’s introducing friction all over again. It’s like breaking a good habit that I’ve spent so long cultivating, knowing that I’d have to rebuild this good habit from the beginning.

Knowing that this is my fear, though, I can figure out a way to set myself up to start again. Do damage control before the damage happens. Some call this a premortem, where you try to anticipate reasons why a project might fail and then come up with ways to mitigate that.

Maybe I’ll bank 1-2 videos so that right after WOP ends, I can publish a video and get a weekly cadence going again. Or maybe I’ll just take an extra week or two off after WOP, take my time in recording a video, and then publish it when I’m ready. After all, nobody is really holding me accountable for a weekly upload. This is just a cadence I imposed onto myself. Who can change that? Oh, me.

I can restart YouTube after a pause. I just have to anticipate that it will take a little bit more time and take that into account when looking at my publishing schedule. I won’t necessarily lose the YouTube momentum, because now I know that I will get back on it.

The cost of a new project

Taking both my fear and energy budgeting into account, this is what my priorities look like now:

1. Full-time job

2. Health

3. Editing essays from Write of Passage

4. This Substack

I’ve pushed down publishing weekly on this Substack because editing will be a higher priority for me. Especially because this will be my first run-through, it will take more energy to learn something new (h/t

Rychelle Moses

).

Though it’s not ideal that I will have to give up something to gain new experiences, this is the cost of pursuing new opportunities. I could have not done this pre-mortem exercise and burn out halfway through, pause my YouTube unexpectedly, have no Substack posts, and/or worse, drop the ball on my editing gig. But now that I’ve shifted my priorities, I know that I will be okay.

Turns out that I can do it all. Just not all at once.

Thanks to friends who are my *peers* (what?!?!?!) as part of the WOP11 crew:

The Conversation Starter

and

Sunday Candy

.

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Update log:

• 👋🏼 Hello new friends from WOP11! Super kind of you to drop by.

• 🥮 This past long weekend was a celebration for mid-autumn festival (despite the non-autumn weather) and Chuseok. It was a great time to gather with friends and chosen family.

• 🏋️‍♀️ Brought a second friend to Bodypump. Exercising is so much more fun when done with friends.

• 👾 Played nuzlocke with friends on Sunday. Each person plays a randomized Pokemon Fire Red game (one of us encountered a Mewtwo in the first 10 mins of the game) with some alcoholic consequences. A great day for nostalgia and some not-so-hardcore soju tasting.

• 💭 Practiced “curiosity about my feelings” and journaled about it in a “thought download” for the first time at the suggestion of my therapist. Essentially it’s to approach my feelings in a “curious” / observational manner instead of wallowing in the feeling itself.

• 📹 On the YouTube channel: Documenting Hong Kong’s bamboo structures in sketchbooks