You can't do everything, everywhere, all at once

Alright. I'm going to try to do more of this, which is just podcasting in one take, if I can, my thoughts on a particular topic. And, usually, these are things I would post on Blue Sky. Previously, I'd post them on Twitter, but now I'm posting more on Blue Sky. And all of this experiment is definitely inspired by Caleb Porzio's excellent one take podcast, notes on work, which is like his personal journal about work and life, and I wanna be doing more of that here.

Anyway, so one thing I posted about on Blue Sky was this. Here's a constant struggle in my life. I wanna do all the things, but everything I do requires resources and bandwidth. And my therapist recently gave me this formula, which is that stress equals demands divided by resources. So if you have more demands than you have resources, you are out of sync.

The goal is to make this a ratio of 1 where the demands roughly equal the available resources. And this has just been a struggle my whole life. I think the entrepreneurial drive often causes that ratio to be out of sync. The demands that we put on ourselves are way higher than the available resources. And sometimes for a period of life, that works when you're building something new, a new business, a new product.

There can be a phase of life where you are just putting in so much effort, way more effort than you'd ever think humanly possible, but this is not a sustainable strategy overall. And I I've been setting up these projects in Claude AI where you can preload it with all this knowledge and then give it instructions. And I have one called Justin's life plan or something like that where I ask Claude to give me life advice as if it was an adviser. And the other day, I thought, you know, I'm going to just type out all of the responsibilities I have off the top of my head. I'm a husband.

I'm a father. I'm the cofounder of transistor.fm. I'm the owner of my own company that does a bunch of things. I'm also the owner of a holding company that does a bunch of investments. I'm one of the partners here in this co working place that we run.

I run a monthly meetup. And, you know, even within each of these is subcategories. Right? I have multiple responsibilities within all of these roles. And any one of these roles is big enough to consume anybody's time.

And it's I was as I typed it in, I was already starting to realize, like, no wonder I feel overwhelmed at times. That's a lot. And the funny thing is I wanna add more to my plate. I wanna do more things. I'm constantly feeling the pull of wanting to start another project or wanting to do, like, I wanna write a one man show that I perform in front of an audience.

I wanna start, like, 5 podcasts. I wanna write 20 different articles. I wanna do a big research project on urbanism. I wanna go back to school and get my master's degree in economics. There's just desires for all sorts of things, and it might be helpful to quickly get a little personal and vulnerable.

And to give you some examples of how Claude responded to me writing all of these responsibilities I have right now. And and so Claude says, let's analyze these responsibilities through the lens of resource management and your strengths. Primary resource consumers. So core professional is Transistor. It's the highest revenue generator.

It's the most structured, established, strong team in place, benefits from your futuristic and communication strengths. I've also loaded this project up with every personality test I've ever done. And so it knows a lot about my strengths and weaknesses. And then Claude gives me recommendations based on his framework. Consider consolidating or simplifying business structures, evaluate the return on investment, both financial and emotional of each venture, look for automation opportunities, and then gives me a high impact, high joy matrix.

So transistor work, family time, investing in my relationship, Medium impact would be community leadership, business infrastructure, and low impact, low joy, administrative tasks, and routine maintenance. Anyway, all of this is very interesting. I can't share it all with you, but I just wanted to point out and give you an example of how I'm using Claude in this way and how helpful I've found it to load up this project with my personal life history, with notes I've given myself, with personality tests I've done, and then have it give me this kind of analysis back through all of this information that I've loaded into it. And I I think what was most helpful in this case was just writing it all out. Just writing out.

Here's what I'm doing right now. And each of these responsibilities creates demands that need resources. And I only have so many resources. Another thing my therapist says is the only way you can bring this ratio into equilibrium is increase resources or reduce demands. That's it.

And, you know, maybe there's some creative ways. I I think one thing I've realized as I'm dreaming about things okay. Here's a good example of a dream. I posted about this on Blue Sky as well. I grew up going to summer camps.

I was a youth leader for a long time, and I just have a lot of great memories of going to summer camp as a high school student, but then also as a college student. And then as a young adult, going on retreats, going on summer camps and camping with friends. And one of the dreams or desires I have is to buy a recreational property that I could turn into kind of a summer camp or retreat or even just have a place that I could run a retreat at or run a reunion at and maybe, you know, rent it out the rest of the year on Airbnb or something. And this is a dream. I'm I'm looking at real estate listings every day, kind of pursuing this dream in a back burner kind of way, but it's always there.

I'm I'm dedicating resources towards it. And I was thinking about this. Okay. Buying a property like this is going to require more resources, and it's going to create more demands on me. That's the the nature of anything like this.

It requires maintenance. It requires lots of management. Who's gonna do that? And I think what I'm learning is that I can't be the CEO of everything. Any new project I start, there has to be someone who is not me who is responsible for managing or leading that thing, unless I'm willing to give up some things that I'm currently the CEO of.

So this whole idea of increasing resources or decreasing demands, but if I'm going to increase demands, I've gotta figure out a way to increase resources. And, truthfully, I think when it comes to career and business, it is just truthfully very difficult to do to have more than one primary career responsibility. And John and I both did this for a period when we were building transistor, but you could only do that for so long. You know, you could only go to the day job and build your side thing, evenings and weekends for so long. So to wrap this up, I think the main things I'm thinking about is a, this formula for stress, which is demands divided by resources and how these need to be in equilibrium.

The second thing was just how helpful it was to write out all of the things that I'm responsible for right now. And to think, wow. If I'm going to add anything to this list, I either have to remove a responsibility or add more resources. And then the third thing was thinking, you know, adding a responsibility without also hiring or delegating the management leadership or CEO position is kind of untenable. If I want to do more things, I'm going to have to figure out how to delegate a lot of the responsibility.