Building Your System

When you're developing multiple skills, think of them as an imaginary progress bar for each one. You keep all skills present in your awareness, tracking where you are with each.

The Challenge of Prioritization

The reality is that you can't develop all skills equally at the same time. You'll need to prioritize one over another for various reasons:

• Motivation: Sometimes you're more motivated to work on a particular skill
• Enjoyment: You might want to focus on what you enjoy most at that moment
• Need for a break: You may need to step back from a skill that's become overwhelming
• Opportunity: External factors might create opportunities to advance one skill at the expense of others

This flexibility is necessary, but it creates a challenge: how do you know what to work on when priorities shift?

The Fallback Strategy

The solution is to build a fallback system. There should always be at least one activity from your list that you can fall back on when you're not sure what to do next.

The ideal is to always know what to do. When motivation is low, when you're between priorities, or when you need a change of pace, your fallback gives you a clear next step.

Reading as a Valuable Fallback

Reading is an excellent fallback activity. It provides value even when you're not actively developing a specific skill. To make this work, maintain a curated list of readings ready to fall back on. When you're not sure what to do, you can always pick up a book or article from your list.

This ensures you're always making progress, even when you're not actively pushing forward on a specific skill.