Uneven workload is a stupid idea

I took on two big projects in a single month — my own training and my own course. Combined with day-to-day operations it became a pile-up. Here's the lesson.

How I got it wrong in June…

My work is still largely tied to me personally. When you work as an author and build an audience, you become the bottleneck in a whole set of processes.

My personal attention and time become an extremely limited resource.

This month I have several important things running in parallel:

1. I’m preparing and teaching lessons on my course “Healthy Relationships” and posting new assignments for our students in the chat every day;

2. I’m taking a course myself called “The Game”, where the assignments require filming videos for social media and watching new lessons on the platform;

3. at the same time I’m setting up off-grid power for our office and apartment so we can keep working during blackouts.

On top of that there’s my ongoing work, consultations, time with my wife, helping my parents and plenty more.

We have a team and I know how to delegate. 80% of everything that doesn’t require my direct involvement gets done without me.

But there are processes you can’t delegate.

My mistake was signing up for a course with daily video filming while running an equivalent course myself at my school New Lifestyle.

Some things are burying me right now: I can’t keep up with replies in my DMs and chats, I can’t keep up with the new lessons of “The Game”, I can’t do the homework properly, because my “Healthy Relationships” course is my priority. Everything else is suffering badly and getting the bare minimum of my attention.

My habit of taking on a lot is playing a bad joke on me. This time I bit off a much bigger piece of the pie than I can chew.

The power cuts added their own small share of chaos, but overall I simply miscalculated the load. The blackouts just amplified it a little.

In the future I won’t take on two big projects in parallel within one month, because combined with day-to-day operations you end up with exactly the pile-up I have now.

Have you ever badly misjudged your own workload and found yourself buried under a wave of commitments?