Focus in Mania

Trying to Get Something Done When You Have a Dozen Ideas

One of the things that I experience, are periods of what I can only call mania¹. I get a flood of ideas, and things I want to do, and these ideas are accompanied by a hyper and frenzied energy that may allow me to get some of those ideas completed, but more often I start a lot of things, without the focus to complete many of them.

When I was younger, this was chaotic and distracting and frustrating. It was difficult to complete the projects that I wanted to work on, and it made me seem to those around me, like a flake.

These feelings of frustration and the embarrassment around how things may be perceived, would push me into a depression spiral. Depression sucks, and I don’t recommend it, however for me depression can often times help me to focus. As my brain works to figure out how to fix the route causes of my depression, the many ideas can distill into one specific or focused idea. When that happens, it’s great. But that’s not always a solution for me. 

In the past couple of years, I’ve come up with a different way of working, and it has yet to yield results, but it has allowed me to not abandon ideas, or feel as if I’m not being productive.

Through the help of a Google Doc that I have entitled ‘Ideas Master List,’ I have pages and pages of ideas that pop into my head. I have them categorized into: TV shows, Movies, Plays, Novels, Short Films, Short Stories, Essays, Comics, and Random. Between these categories, I have 142 individual ideas at the time of writing this post. These ideas are broken into bullet lists, and I can add notes as they pop into my head as sub-bullets.

Keeping this list is an important method of keeping ideas from slipping away, and with the exception of when I’m driving, I add to this list whenever an idea pops into my head—my wife every once in a while wakes up to me typing furiously into the Google Docs app on my phone at 1:30 in the morning.

That’s the first step in trying to focus and harness my mania. The second, is that I allow myself to jump from idea to idea, within a smaller group of ideas. Right now, I’m working on; Without a Tether, my time travel autobiography; a TV show, for which I have a draft of a series bible complete and am working on a pilot script; and a novel, which I’m adapting from a previously unproduced screenplay I wrote. 

I try to stay on these three things, because it’s not too much to manage, and what it allows me to do is not hit a wall. If I’m stuck on something with the TV show, I may switch screens and resume work on the novel. 

I’ve also been using Without a Tether as a method of starting out my day, and getting focused. I have the first 40 entries written, and so each morning, I go in and I copy the next entry from my document into here, and I reread, and edit, and add things to it, and schedule it for 1 week after the last entry—as of right now, I have the next 3 months scheduled, and more to go!

Is my method overwhelming, or chaotic? I suspect that many people wouldn’t like this method, but it is working really well for me right now.

1. I wrote last week about my sense of identity, and how a lot of it is wound up in my diagnosis of manic depressive from twenty years ago. I also wrote about how my symptoms no longer meet the qualifications for that diagnosis, so please take some of what I’m about to say as my lack of vocabulary around these symptoms, and not me trying to be clinical. ↩︎