Coping 11: Working in parallel
Coping is short posts on Fridays about coping methods for doing creative and focused things in an unfocused world. In Coping 11, doing related tasks in parallel.
A perennial difficulty with creative work, intellectual work, or really anything that requires a certain kind of thinking, is the risk that focus, productivity, or inspiration can be unreliable. Sometimes, making something happen just doesn't work. This is where working in parallel comes in handy.
Working in parallel is having multiple projects, ideally somehow interconnected, that feed each other but aren't in mutual dependency. Projects on similar topics, different outcomes from one line of thinking, research, or creation, all can feed into each other while being separate enough to switch between. For me, this switching gives me the opportunity to release the proverbial pressure valve on one thing by doing another, while still contributing to the thinking or development I need to do towards the first task.
To make it more practical: a project can have a technical component, a participatory component, and an academic writing component, all contributing to the same main goal. By working on the three different things in parallel and switching when one of them starts to feel like a grind, or is delivering diminishing returns, I can manage to keep the ball rolling, keep the over-all line developing, while making it less important that I achieve this one high-pressure deliverable right now.
This is not a sustainable way of working all the time, and more often than not, taking a walk is as good as switching tasks for my own productivity. But working in parallel is a method that, for me at least, allows incremental or tangential progress towards a goal to still feel valuable, and lets me give myself a little more grace if things aren't going to plan.
