When I think about work, I sometimes visualize a collection of little boxes in which I can put things.

This is true of paid work—the projects that help me make rent and buy groceries—but also the sort of work I do alongside that, which is maybe just for fun, maybe meant to help me grow in some fashion, maybe something experimental and boundary-expanding, and maybe something that will someday evolve into a money-making venture.

I suspect I reflexively reach for this metaphor because I often find myself with things I’d like to do, but lacking a proper place to put them.

And while it’s of course possible (and often desirable) to do things without scaffolding or pre-set purpose, I personally find that having some sort of order, some kind of framework underpinning the things I intend to formally try my hand at helps me achieve consistency, track growth, adjust my priors (my initial expectations and beliefs, both over time tempered and reshaped by my growing knowledge and know-how), and iterate more reliably than when I just grab at something and fiddle around with it for a few minutes here and there.

I might come across a concept I’d like to write about, for instance, only to discover that I don’t have the right box for it, the right project, which then leaves me either having to shoehorn it into a container in which it doesn’t quite fit—the angles blunted, the surfaces dented and bruised—or I leave it loose and fluttering in the wind, untethered and consequently disconnected from the larger collection of things I’m working on.

The boxes I set up for myself, then, tend to be important because they in some ways shape how I’m thinking about the ideas and activities I’m focusing on at any given moment.

Sometimes those disconnected ideas and micro-projects serve as seeds that eventually bloom into their own thing. Several of my current projects were grown from a single idea that then sprouted and became more formalized, eventually attracting more of my attention and time when I realized that embryonic notion could become something bigger and more expansive.

Sometimes these bits and pieces remain just that, though, and there’s nothing at all wrong with having an idea scrap-drawer (mine is a folder in my main writing app), but I do find that giving even the tiniest supportive surface to something can lend legs it wouldn’t otherwise benefit from.

At times, I’ve pulled concepts from that folder filled with not-quite-right-for-what-I’m-working-on-currently ideas and expounded them into mini-projects, just for me, opting to take a sort of journaling approach to writing about them each day in a note-to-self format, rather than attempting to convert them into a public-facing product of some kind or leaving them to gather moss, filed alongside a jumble of other misfit tidbits and not-quite-there meanderings.

When something does grab and hold me tightly enough that I decide to unfold it into a larger project, committing some of my day or week or month to it at a regular cadence, I’m careful to set a check-in date at which point I’ll reassess whether the thing would benefit from more time and attention, or if it’s maybe time to pack it in, archiving it and freeing up those chronological and mental resources for some other undertaking.

This makes it a bit easier to commit to box-building, as I know from the get-go that there will be a moment at which I can gracefully bow-out without disappointing myself, feeling like I haven’t given something sufficient extrapolatory attention before shutting it down and recalibrating my schedule in a different direction.

Box-building is still far from a casual decision, though, as even a month’s worth of dedicated labor is a substantial investment of one’s finite life, and there are countless other things one might focus on, instead.

Ultimately, this is one more way of framing the process of coping with the trade-offs inherent in learning and making and doing anything at all, and it’s one that works decently well for me as a person who’s interested in essentially everything, and who might otherwise lack focus, trying to pursue all those everythings at once.

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