Time for another deliberately inflammatory title!

Yep, this phrase is usually for messy situations involving relationships and whilst I expect most of us have come across that at some point this is not related to infidelity. There are a few parallels though that we'll touch on when they come up.

To start with we should talk about workspaces. If you're anything like me you don't have as many workspaces as you might like. If you're lucky you'll have a workspace for each project type but for many of us one workspace has to do most of the heavy lifting across various disciplines. Projects have to jockey for position in the priority list as only a few can be deployed at any one time.

I'm sure there's someone out there with nearly limitless workshop space. Presumably they're renting one of those old workshop spaces one sometimes sees in movies. That lovely place they use for planning the job in Inception, for example. Huge and sprawling with the space for almost as many projects and materials as anyone could desire.

That said - even if that's you, I'll bet this approach will help anyway.

Let's say you're wanting to work on a project and you've got it fully deployed in your workspace, whatever form that might take. You put some work into it but start to hit the difficult bits. Not necessarily things you can't overcome but some form of challenge. Running out of time for the day you leave it deployed and go about your life. As you prepare to pick it back up again you remember that other project you've been meaning to work on.

It's going to be good, isn't it?

There's that new technique you've been planning to try out, or maybe you've been perfecting that technique and now it's time to really shine.

Oh but you're working on this other one and that's taking up the space. You can probably put it to one side and work on the other project though, right?

Well yes, you could, and sometimes that's the right decision. However much of the time it's not so much a decision as a one-thing-leads-to-another. You didn't try to objectively weigh up whether the initial project should be put to one side in favour of the other one, instead it was just sort of easier to work on something else?

This process then repeats with another project pulling you aside after a little while. Eventually both the workspace and the projects are in a state where serious decisions need to be made to either get things on track, or possibly even start axing projects.

Here's where the relationship comparison starts to come in. Let's say you've been with your partner, flatmate, or whatever for a while. It doesn't need to be a romantic relationship, a domestic one of any kind will suffice for this concept. They have certain habits that get on your nerves, perhaps even drive you up the wall. Whilst you still like them it's to the detriment of the relationship.

You may then start to think of other people you meet as not having those foibles. Of course, they probably don't have exactly those irritating behaviours but they probably have their own (equally aggravating) habits! The difference is that you can't see those things from where you're standing. You only see them as a more perfect person than the person you're currently sharing part of your life with. If you were to move in with them you'd quickly find that they're far from perfect either (and let's be fair, the chances of you being perfect are pretty slim anyway!).

Do you see where I'm going with all this, reader?

It's not so much a "you must be faithful" as a "don't give up based on biased, incomplete information". Most projects have a stage where they start to get challenging - and when other projects start to look far easier and more appealing.

It's usually an illusion - the other projects are just abstract concepts at this stage and you're struggling to truly grasp the problems you'll run into when you get a similar distance into those projects. You might understand what sorts of problems you'll face but it can be very difficult to compare them to the very tangible problems of the current project.

That isn't to say that sometimes the challenges can't become too much. Sometimes the right thing to do is give up - whether that's a relationship or a project. However you should do so not on the basis of the grass being greener but by judging the current project in as objective a manner as you can manage. By that I mean consider why you're started to be distracted - is something on the project intimidating? Monotonous? What's stopping you from continuing? Why are other projects suddenly starting to appeal when they didn't before? What are the push factors, I suppose, rather than the pull factors.

My personal example for this is my miniature painting space. It's not a huge space and miniatures are (usually) pretty small. In previous places I've lived I've allowed myself to have multiple painting projects in the area. Do you know how long it took me to finish anything? I certainly don't but many of the units I painted took literal years to complete. Years. I'd shuffle them around, decide I wasn't sure whether I should work on this one or that one, and in the end usually I'd do something else.

By having many options I'd find myself stuck in analysis paralysis, rarely making any significant progress. It wasn't even the kind of dithering I tend to think of when I hear that term. No, it was more of a case of making a choice with too much deliberation. There wasn't really a correct answer based on the factors at play. The correct answer was a quick one, one that didn't come with a lot of analytical overhead, or emotional overhead.

...and it took me a very long time to figure that out.

In our current place I keep most of my miniatures in our garage maker space - whether that's finished, unfinished, yet to be assembled, or anything in between. The only miniatures I allow inside are the one unit I'm working on (sometimes a single miniature, sometimes a group, but one project regardless). There are sometimes exceptions to this but by and large I do not allow more than one on the bench.

The end result is that when I want to paint I sit down and there's what I'm going to paint. There might be all manner of other models out in the garage but it'll definitely take longer to go dig them out. Better to stay inside, put on an audiobook, and focus on this project.

I also apply this to other areas of the things I create - I try to keep each project type to one active one. I don't want to say I have laser-like focus and stick to one doggedly - no, I jump between writing, sculpting, painting, programming, and various other things. However where possible I try to bear in mind that for whatever challenge I'm facing my fatigue may be that I don't currently see the flaws in the alternative projects.

This does also mean that when I decide that it's not just a grass-is-always-greener situation I don't feel any guilt about stepping away from the project. I didn't give it up in favour of something else - I did so because it made sense to do so at this stage.

An example of this might be finishing a section of a book. I could try to press onto the next section but I'm probably pretty tired and not at my best for this medium. Better to switch to something else while I recharge a bit. It's not so much the to as the from, if you see what I mean?

That's probably also pretty good relationship advice, when I think about it. Don't leave because someone better comes along, leave because now is when the relationship should finish. Or don't leave at all if the problems you're facing are just going to crop up in the next one.

More broadly this could also be taken as a call to action for a way to combat analysis paralysis - if you find yourself repeatedly procrastinating then a bit of reframing and perhaps a change of how you store things might help. It probably won't solve it immediately but it could help you reclaim control to a certain extent.

Lastly, as with many other concepts in this book, the goal isn't to be perfect. Few of us can be ascetic monks with absolute self-control and I'm not sure whether that's even a good thing to aspire to anyway... Sometimes it's better to drop a project for another one even if it makes no sense, sometimes the enthusiasm is too much to contain. The lesson here is more about building a generalised habit and framework - if you break it on occasion that's okay!