Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Juggling

If you know me, you’ll know I tend to juggle various engagements and contracts and usually enjoy the variety and challenge which this offers. However, every now and then I hit a point at which I have to temporarily still the balls I’m juggling, assess their weight and decide how much longer I can keep each one in the air.

This is the kind of assessment I’ve been doing lately and I’ve been thinking that many of my strengths in juggling can also be my weaknesses.

I can have, and enjoy having, multiple projects on the go. But the cost of this is that something going wrong with one project can often have a negative impact on others, i.e. if one project suddenly demands more time than I had originally budgeted, I have to scramble to realign the balance.

One of my strengths is that I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for many issues and causes. But this can be bad when my enthusiasm has me biting off more than I can chew, and since a lot of what I do tends to be in the areas of social justice, advocacy and community development, I tend to invest a lot of myself in any given project – again, something which is both an asset and a liability.

My passion makes me driven and committed. It can also mean that I do not pay enough attention to the personal and financial costs of what I do. So part of my stepping back and looking at things from time to time is to conduct a little reality check on the amount of effort and time I am investing in something and how much it is costing. This is not much fun to do, but seems like a responsible, adult-like exercise.

So I’ve been looking at and weighing each of the balls I’ve been juggling over the last few months, as well as my capacity to juggle them. Some balls have grown so heavy they skew the balance. Some I keep around because their lightness counteracts the heaviness of others.

Once this process is done I can take a deep breath and set things in motion again.

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