I have a lot of projects.
Probably too many, depending on who you ask.
There are blogs, videos, characters, websites, ideas that have become something, and ideas sitting around waiting to see if they ever will.
I’ve tried organizing all of this. I’ve made schedules. I’ve made lists. I’ve created neat little places for different projects to live.
And still, they refuse to stay in their assigned rooms.
An idea from one project wanders into another. Something I write makes me think about a video. A video sends me back to something I wrote months ago. Sometimes I’m halfway through working on one thing when I suddenly realize I’ve stumbled onto the beginning of something completely different.
That happened again recently.
I was working on a post for Critically Curious with Sven. The post was supposed to be the project. That was what I was there to do.
But somewhere in the process, something else caught my attention.
There was an idea inside the idea.
And almost immediately I could see that it didn’t really belong to Sven. Or at least, it didn’t belong only to Sven. There was a larger question hiding underneath it that felt much more like something I wanted to explore on Creator in the Loop.
So now one project has quietly created the beginning of another.
This is where I start wondering about the difference between a creative detour and a distraction.
Because they can look remarkably similar at first.
The temptation of the new idea
I know what distraction feels like.
Sometimes a project gets difficult or boring, and suddenly reorganizing a folder seems fascinating.
Or I remember something else I should do.
Or I have a brilliant new idea that, conveniently, doesn’t contain any of the difficult problems of the thing I’m currently working on.
That kind of detour isn’t particularly mysterious.
It’s avoidance wearing a creative hat.
But I don’t think that’s always what’s happening.
Sometimes I’m not trying to escape the project at all. I’m fully engaged with it. I’m following an idea, asking questions, making connections, and somewhere in that process another path appears.
I don’t necessarily follow it immediately.
But I notice it.
And that’s different.
At least I think it is.
Maybe ideas don’t know which project they belong to
I tend to think about my projects as separate things.
PixelPia’s Perspective is this space. Creator in the Loop is another. Critically Curious has Sven and his particular way of looking at things. Curiously Miscellaneous has Curio asking questions that can wander in entirely different directions.
They have different purposes and different voices.
From an organizational point of view, separating them makes sense.
Creatively, I’m not sure my brain cares.
The same curiosity is moving between all of them.
A question about AI might become satire in Sven’s hands, an exploration on Creator in the Loop, and eventually a more personal reflection here.
The subject changes because the place changes.
So does the way I approach it.
But somewhere underneath, there may be a connection I didn’t deliberately create.
I’ve noticed this with Curio too. That project started in one place and then kept opening doors I hadn’t planned to walk through. Each time, I had a choice. I could pull it back toward the original idea, or I could see where the new question went.
Lately, I’ve been more willing to see where it goes.
Focus isn’t always a straight line
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about focus as staying with one thing.
Pick the project.
Do the work.
Finish the project.
Move to the next one.
There is value in that. Without some version of it, I would probably have 700 beginnings and three finished things.
But perhaps creative focus doesn’t always mean moving in a straight line.
Maybe there is another kind of focus that comes from staying with a question even when that question moves between projects.
That feels different to me.
If I’m working on one thing, become bored, open something completely unrelated, abandon that too, and repeat the process, I’m probably scattered.
But if an idea keeps following me from one project into another, perhaps I’m not changing the subject at all.
Perhaps I’m getting closer to it.
And that makes me look at my collection of projects a little differently.
What if they’re not as separate as I think?
Maybe I’ve been thinking too much in terms of containers.
This is the blog.
This is the YouTube channel.
This is Sven.
This is Curio.
This belongs here.
That belongs there.
Those distinctions are useful. They help me know what I’m making and who I’m making it for.
But they may not describe what’s actually happening creatively.
Perhaps all these projects are different places where I can look at whatever I’m curious about from another angle.
Sven can ridicule something I want to question.
Curio can ask the simple question that makes me realize I haven’t thought something through.
Creator in the Loop can turn that question into an exploration.
And here, I can sit with whatever is left over afterward and wonder what I actually think about it.
That doesn’t sound quite as much like having too many projects.
It sounds more like one ongoing conversation with several different ways into it.
I’m not sure I would have described it that way before.
So when does the detour become the direction?
I still don’t have a good rule for this.
Maybe I don’t need one.
I think I just want to become better at noticing the difference between running away from the work and following something that has genuinely caught my curiosity.
One pulls me away because I don’t want to stay.
The other pulls me somewhere because I want to know what’s there.
From the outside, both might look like I’ve wandered off again.
And maybe I have.
But I’m beginning to suspect that some of those detours aren’t taking me away from my work at all.
They might be showing me what the work is becoming.
