The Multi-Project Advantage
If you've spent any time in productivity circles, or on perky productivity Youtube, you've been lectured about the sacred art of "focus". Focus, they tell us, is everything. Pick one thing. Master it. Become the world's foremost expert on model train restoration or artisanal pickles or whatever the fuck your chosen obsession happens to be.
But if you’re anything like me, you’re a boundless and restless creative that’s inspired by shiny new things each day. Jotting down notes for that new project you’re scheming, recklessly researching strategies for another entirely new business model, tinkering with new process, new techniques, new mediums.
Full disclosure today’s letter serves two personal purposes:
I’m here to get fired up about my fascination with Polyculture, as a concept and metaphor in general.
and I’m here because of my unwavering desire to start a new content platform, one that’s entirely unique to anything else I’m working on right now, one that makes absolutely no logical sense to pursue at this very moment in time. And I gotta justify my whim!
The Tyranny of Creative Monoculture
Okay, let's talk farming. Let’s talk Monoculture; endless fields of corn stretching across the horizon as far as the eye can see. Picture it, just one identical crop, one harvest, maximum yield per square foot. Copy-paste CornCornCornCorn, over and over and over. One set of needs, same daily and seasonal maintenance routine, replicated again and again to develop one product. Efficient but repetitive as fuck.
AND it’s also an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
Also it’s just corn? Boring.
Plant the same crop year after year and you're going to deplete the soil, invite every pest in a fifty-mile radius to munch-up all your hard work, and set yourself up for spectacular failure the second the conditions change.
Creative monoculture works the same way. Pick your “One True Calling”, commit to it, and grind away until you achieve mastery or die trying.
Your brain isn't a sterile factory floor, and creativity is not corn.
When you pour all your creative energy into one project, you're strip-mining your imagination. You exhaust the obvious solutions, hit creative dead ends and worst of all, you begin to despise the thing you once loved. It's like being forced to eat your favourite food every single meal until the mere sight of it makes you wanna hurl.
Sure, there are success stories. Someone will inevitably mention that one novelist who spent seventeen years crafting their magnum opus in a cabin in the woods, emerging squinting into the sunlight with a Pulitzer and endless bounties of lustful admirers. Great for them. But for every hermit-genius, there are thousands of creatives who burned out, gave up, or they just got so bored they started dusting off real estate licensing courses.
My Chaos Garden Approach
Now imagine a different kind of farm. Instead of endless rows of identical crops, picture a wild tangle of plant life: vegetables growing between fruit trees, herbs sprawling along pathways, flowers summoning in helpful insects, nitrogen-fixing legumes enriching the soil for their plant-neighbours, a friendly pig named Wilbur resides here with a sassy rooster named Roy, and everything you need to make a killer salsa is within reach.
To the monoculture crowd on the outside looking in it appears to be chaos. Reckless, perhaps messy, but it’s anything but.
This is polyculture: a system where diversity creates resilience, where different forms of life support each other, and where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. When one crop fails, others thrive. When pests attack one species, the sassy rooster pecks their balls off.
Creative polyculture works the same way, except instead of crops, you're growing projects. Instead of soil nutrients, you're cycling creative energy. And instead of pesticides, you're using the cross-pollination between different pursuits to keep your imagination running hot hot hot.
The Beautiful Mess of Multiple Projects
Juggling multiple creative projects isn't just okay, I think it's the superior strategy compared to the precious single-minded approach.
First, there's the “motivation rescue” effect. You know that feeling when your main project hits a wall and suddenly writing feels like waterboarding torture? With multiple projects on the go, you just pivot to the next thing. Stuck on Chapter 7 of your novel? That’s fine, go design that logo for your friend's podcast. Can't crack the chord progression for your next song? Perfect time to work on that short story that's been percolating.
Second, different projects require different types of energy. Some days you wake up ready to tackle complex analytical problems. Other days, your brain feels like macaroni and you can barely string together a grocery list. Instead of forcing yourself into deep thinking when you're in shallow surface-skimming mode (or vice versa), you can match your current mental state to the most aligned project.
Third! Your projects start talking to each other. That photography hobby teaches you about composition, which improves your graphic design work, which influences how you structure scenes in your screenplay, which changes how you approach problem solving in your day job.
Then magic happens, when projects that seem completely unrelated start forming unexpected connections.
Take Darwin, who wasn't just puttering around the Galápagos bird watching. While developing his theory of evolution, he was also studying barnacles, breeding pigeons, chatting it up with botanists about plant reproduction, and obsessing over earthworms. (Yes, WORMS! Talk about range.) Each pursuit informed the others, all that dot connecting created a rich ecosystem of understanding that culminated in revolutionary insights about the natural world.
What about David Bowie, who wasn't content just making music. He painted, acted, collected art, studied mime (HE STUDIED MIME!), and incorporated elements from these disciplines into his musical persona(s). The result wasn't diluted creativity, it was self-expression amplified in all the best ways, he created this rich universe around his art and his journey, and it made for a fertile foundation for ongoing evolution and new incarnations.
Managing the Chaos
Now, before you quit your job to become a full-time polymath, or drop all of your commitments that are 70% of the way to the finish line to adopt a new passion project, let's talk about the practical side of creative polyculture. Because yes, it's possible to have too much of a good thing, and there's a difference between productive diversity and just being an unreliable and scattered procrastinator.
The key is intentional selection. You don't want seventeen completely random projects competing for attention. Instead, aim for a thoughtful mix that complements your current needs and interests.
Maybe you have one major long-term project (your novel, your business, your attempt to learn the “sexy kind of French” finally). Then add one or two smaller, more immediate projects that can provide quick wins and creative refreshment. Include something that uses different parts of your brain. If your main project is analytical, add something tactile or visual. If you work in words, maybe try something with your hands.
For me personally, The Creator Code is a more neutral toned and formulaic outlet that serves specific values and goals, but doesn’t satiate a desire for a platform that affords raw self expression or the space to address more extreme or provocative artistic themes. I figure granting myself permission to create a container that serves that side of me will elevate and inspire all of my work, because it’s just going to help me be more “Me”.
Time management becomes an art form rather than a rigid science. Forget those productivity gurus who insist you need to time-block everything down to the minute. With creative polyculture, you're working with natural rhythms and energy cycles. Some projects get months of attention, then lie dormant for a while. Others require consistent daily tending. Still others emerge only when you're stuck elsewhere.
The goal isn't perfect balance, it's finding a sustainable flow.
Yesterday I had to miss out on morning writer’s hour to get on an international call with an act in Ireland, and to accommodate that shift I dedicated more time today to my writing practice. I’m someone who’s generally terrified that if I lose the streak, and miss a day to show up and check the box on one of my commitments, that the whole map will unravel and I’ll be homeless eating cat food before the end of the month. However grasping my schedule too tightly creates a daily routine where I find myself just going through the motions, I’m not present, and I’m not open to new connections or opportunities. To avoid this I’m learning to think of progress in terms of weeks, months and quarters rather than minutes, hours and days.
Document the connections. Keep a notebook, a digital file, or just take mental notes about how your projects inform each other. When you notice that your pottery experiments have given you ideas about textures for your next line of merch, write it down. These cross-references become uniquely valuable creative capital over time.
When Polyculture Fucks Your Shit Up
Creative polyculture isn't for everyone, and it’s not always the right approach. There are times when single-minded focus is exactly what you need.
Deadlines have a way of ranking priorities, and some projects genuinely require extended periods of deep, uninterrupted work.
The warning signs of polyculture fucking your shit up are pretty obvious:
You're starting new projects faster than you're making meaningful progress on existing ones.
You feel scattered rather than energized and inspired
You're using "I'm exploring my creativity" as an excuse to avoid the hard work of actually finishing hard things.
If this sounds familiar, it might be time to prune your chaos garden. Choose two or three projects MAX that genuinely excite you and put the others on hold. You can always come back to them later.
Trust the Long Game
Creativity isn't a sprint, it's not even a marathon. It's more like tending to a garden over decades. Some years you'll have amazing tomatoes. Other years an army of snails will slime-in and poke holes in years of hard work. Creative polyculture acknowledges this reality. Instead of betting everything on one creative pursuit or ideal outcome, you build a diverse ecosystem that can weather droughts, storms, and the inevitable seasons when nothing seems to grow no matter what you do.
You also build and practice anti-fragility. When the market for your main skill disappears, when your industry gets disrupted, when your passion project becomes your day job and loses its magic, you have other streams of success and fulfillment to fall back on.
And let's be completely honest, working on multiple projects is just more fun and interesting. Life is short, the world is vast and strange, and there are so many brilliantly weird and wonderful things to explore.
So here's your official permission slip:
You don't have to pick just one thing.
You don’t have to be just one thing.
You don't have to become a laser-focused specialist if that's not how your brain works. You don't have to apologize for having multiple interests, and you definitely don't have to listen to well-meaning friends who insist you'd be more successful if you just "committed" to something.
Your creative polyculture is not a character flaw. It's not a lack of discipline or commitment. It's a different way of being creative, one that acknowledges the messy, interconnected reality of how ideas (and your brain) actually work.
Plant your seeds. Water them regularly. Let them cross-pollinate in unexpected ways. Watch some thrive while others lie dormant. Feed Wilbur tasty apples and wrangle your rooster. And trust the process, even when it looks like chaos to outside observers.
Photo by Travis Essinger on Unsplash