The process of focusing to your big picture starts a pile of small tasks, ideas, books you have read, hobbies you love, hobbies you haven’t even started yet and all kinds of other activities that at first don’t seem to have anything in common.

It’s the one happy mess that most of have learned to call life.

What we’re about to do now is to jump right into that mess and start making some sense of the chaos. This is not a scientifically proven theory, and I’m just a regular guy, insanely interested in too many things. But what I’m about to present is a simple approach to making some sense of your interests and the big picture behind them.

Let’s get started

Write all the things you are interested in down on paper, letting your keywords flow from your mind without thinking about them too much.

But don’t make it look like a list. A list is too organized, and doesn’t have enough room for change – at least compared to your mind. A mind map like approach works much better:

Now that you have your first inner picture, let’s start to add some more detail to it.

Just look at the interests you have listed, and write down the things you are doing or would like to do related to each of them. It’s also OK to add new top level items as they pop into your mind, or make some top level items to be lower level items…

It’s your mind, so feel free to do anything with it.

You will notice that some items already start to get connected, while others remain isolated.

It’s time to make your first focusing decision: Do you cut out most things and concentrate in only one or two of the items in your current picture, or do you start zooming out?

In my example, I have already done a bit of zooming out, and I can see quite a few different, interesting paths in it: I could pick the career of a political blogger, and cut out programming, I could become a creative musician, or then I could pick programming and leave all the others aside.

But this is still just the starting point, so I suggest you try zooming out a bit more – you can always decide to zoom in and become an expert in only one thing later on the road, so why not experiment a bit first?

Zooming out means that you look at all the things you have written down on your paper, maybe adding some new words as well, and try to see if there is something that would connect the things to each other.

You can’t have it all…

After zooming out for a while, you’ll see that some of the items form cliques together with each other. But some don’t seem to fit in. This is when you will go back to the question: Do you cut out the things that don’t fit in the image and concentrate in the items that do, or do you try to zoom out a bit more?

You have to give up on some things sooner or later.

Maybe not for good, but at least for now. Of course, we’re going to try to maximize the number of things you can keep by doing things like zooming out and finding the common denominator, as well as by outsourcing some work to specialists and buying more time. But in the end, you still have a limited amount of time and energy to spend. And you need to use it wisely if you don’t want to burn out.

If you look at my example again, you’ll see that I did some reorganization and noticed that most of the things listed are related to each other – only two things are completely unconnected: programming and family.

Family is something special, as it’s a value rather than an activity, but programming is something I might consider dropping. Zooming out more, I’ll however see that programming is related to blogging and Internet marketing.

Another border case, economics, is included in this version, but might still drop out in the next iteration. It’s only tied to one other item, after all. Then again, the round of zooming that comes after that one might again find new connections. As I said in my original post about zooming, the process never ends.

The more practical approach to figuring out what to drop

If you have the time and can get a hold of Seth Godin’s small book, The Dip, I recommend you check it out. The book gives you some ideas on when to quit a project and when to stick. Also, the entrepreneur interview I did some time ago on deciding what projects to take on can give you good insight to the question.

But what you’re after is most likely a step by step check list of signs that will tell you to abandon some activities and to stick with some other ones. The process described above is a slow one that will be good for getting an overall understanding on things you want to carry on doing, but doesn’t help much in deciding what you should work on today.

That’s what we’re going to talk about next. Subscribe to my RSS feed and get the next post delivered straight to your computer as soon as it comes out of the press.

But first, let’s talk about your big picture! Is zooming out working for you? What have you figured out so far? What did you drop? What did you keep? What would you improve in the process? Leave a comment!