How many writing projects are you holding in your head right now—like, actively holding—not just the one on your desk, but all the others tugging at you in the background?
In this episode, I’m talking about the hidden cost of carrying too many writing projects at once: the almost-finished article, the chapter that needs revision, the proposal you keep meaning to start, and the project you feel guilty for neglecting. Individually, each one might be manageable, but together they create a constant background hum of obligation that drains your cognitive and emotional bandwidth—even on days when you’re genuinely productive.
We often treat these difficulties as a scheduling problem, but what I see again and again is that the deeper issue is scattered attention: too many open tabs on your brain’s desktop quietly pulling on you. Academia trains us to tolerate this, even to see it as ambition, but it comes at a real cost.
So I’m inviting you to consider a different kind of progress—choosing what’s active and what’s explicitly dormant for now. You don’t have to abandon anything forever; sometimes naming what you’re not working on is what finally lets you focus, settle, and move forward without guilt.
