How to Manage Multiple Interests (Without Spreading Yourself Thin)

6 techniques I use to make steady progress on my various self-learning projects and hobbies

Curiosity is a gift and a curse.

It motivates you to learn and expand your horizons. It pushes you to try new things. It helps you read, think, and create.

The problem is that sometimes curiosity can push you in the wrong direction—or in a million directions at once—away from your most important interests and learning projects and towards the other interests that compete for your limited time and attention.

Throughout my twenties, it often felt like my wide-ranging curiosity, while a blessing, was also the most persistent threat to my productivity, peace of mind, and sense of accomplishment.

There were so many skills I wanted to learn, subjects I wanted to study, and people I wanted to become. And so I went after all of them, and like a tiger hunting seven animals at once, I failed to dig my teeth into any single one of them.

I was a dabbler. A dilettante. I would start a new project or some new course of study in a specific subject only to, weeks later, give up and start another one.

Over time, as I watched my friends graduate from law school or business school or become experts in their professions or their fields of study, or just damn good tennis players or literary nerds, I became increasingly frustrated by how little progress I was making on my most important interests, like essay writing, fiction writing, running, classic novels, US history, and political philosophy.

What was I an expert in? What could I do better than anyone else?

I realized I was spread too thin, overwhelmed like some 18th-century father of 21 children, struggling to give each one the attention and love it needed to grow.

Don’t get me wrong—trying new things and jumping around is an effective way to identify your authentic interests. And we should all embrace those random nosedives into new topics unrelated to our big goals in life. But after a while, we need to prioritize a bit.

We need to commit, for a promiscuity of focus can leave one feeling agitated that their efforts in learning aren’t bearing any fruit, like:

• A new business

• A new career

• A new skill

• A new body of expertise

• A new mastery of a craft

So there I was, in my mid-twenties, little to show for my learning, when I decided to get focused. A little too focused…

My first failed attempt at a solution: total tunnel vision

My first move was to ignore basically all of my interests except a few.

I said things like: “Writing essays about autodidactism and studying fiction will be my focus from now on. All my free time outside of work will go towards that.”

But I was incapable of such narrowness!

I can’t confine my life to 1-2 interests for the long-term. We aren’t put on this earth to just burrow into a single hole for the rest of our lives. It might be economically efficient to specialize, but for many of us, it’s also spiritually draining, for it neglects aspects of ourselves that need recruitment to stay strong and feel alive, like cooking for my sense of smell and running for my heart.

During that failure to go full tunnel vision, I realized that maybe what I needed was some sort of strategy…

If I was going to make satisfying progress on several of my interests, without spreading myself thin or becoming a total specialist, I had to learn some best practices for managing these subjects, skills, and hobbies like an effective polymath.

My 6 Favorite Techniques for Making Progress on Multiple Interests

I must say, over the past few years, I’ve tried a lot of techniques, and have found six techniques that have worked well for me, all of which I’ll share in this article.

I’m not perfect by any means.

Just the other day, I considered applying to a US History master’s program.

Hovering over the application requirements page, like some mouth-foaming addict, I felt for a brief moment completely convinced I could manage the workload on top of practicing fiction writing, writing a weekly newsletter, handling my client work, studying literature, reading political philosophy, learning to cook, researching autodidactism, running, lifting, meditating, and climbing up the ranks in my newly revived gaming addiction: League of Legends.

But, I will say I am at least better at managing all these interests than I used to be. For the last few years, I’ve been able to stick to several interests and make real progress on them.

I ran a sub-2-hour half-marathon. I wrote an ebook. I grew my newsletter to 13,000 subscribers. I got my bench press to 200 pounds. I wrote 100+ articles on the subject of Autodidactism (I actually can’t believe that!). I read dozens of classic novels and numerous non-fiction books—all while managing my freelance business and my relationships (though, not my sink; it’s filled with dishes as I type this).

And, most importantly, I feel happy about this progress because those interests I focused on were deeply important to me. They were aligned not only with my curiosity but also with my dreams and my values.

So I want to say—being a multipassionate person and managing all those interests is challenging, but possible.

Here are the six techniques that have most helped me become, if not a true Renaissance Man, at least a little more sane and productive across multiple domains of life.

1. Focus on fewer things (The 5/25 Rule)

In his book, Slow Productivity, Cal Newport lists three principles for producing high-value work over the course of your career:

• Obsess over quality

• Work at a natural pace

• Do fewer things

That last one was the most crucial for me to hear—also the most painful. But Cal’s case studies were like water, helping me swallow the pill, especially the story of John McPhee, a rather extreme example of someone doing less.

In 1966, John McPhee was struggling with how to structure a complex article.

So he spent two weeks doing little more than lying on a backyard picnic table staring at a tree, thinking about the problem, until, like a revelation, the solution finally came to him.

When I read this, it put into perspective how many things I’m doing each day, and how that might be holding me back from truly progressing on any of them.

If growth is a product of concentration, which it surely is, then the more focus you give to some skill, hobby, or subject—the more gasoline you pour on it—the more likely it is to expand into a blazing inferno of excellence.

The problem is—having just one focus is often too little for me. I cannot just focus on one thing for weeks, at least not yet.

So what’s the right number of things to focus on? What is “doing fewer things”? Newport provides nuanced answers in his book, but a popular anecdote about Warren Buffett gave me an answer that stuck with me a bit better.

Warren Buffett’s life advice to his pilot.

When Warren Buffett’s pilot, Mike Flint, asked him for career advice, Buffett replied with an exercise.

He told the pilot to take out a pen and paper and list the top 25 things he wanted to accomplish in his career, and then to circle the 5 he wanted to achieve the most. These would be his priorities. This is known as the 2-list or 5/25 method of prioritization.

As if spending time in the clouds had made him feel anything was possible, the pilot assumed that he would prioritize those five goals and get to the rest of the list in the spare moments of his day.

But Buffet corrected him. He told the pilot that those 20 goals were to be avoided at all costs. They were the most dangerous distractions because they were interesting to him. Ironically, feeling drawn to them was a sign to guard oneself against them.

Buffett once said that “the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,” and this 5/25 method sure aligns with this belief.

So here’s a step to take.

Before you do any of the other techniques on this list, run the 5/25 experiment, if only as an exercise in admitting to yourself that you are a finite being with finite time and therefore, you must prioritize.

The act may very well bring out of the clouds and into reality, a shift that must happen if any meaningful progress on multiple interests is to be made.

2. Build a Lifelong Learning Compass

Buffet’s 5/25 method is mainly for big career goals, like building a business or getting your law degree, not necessarily hobbies or self-education pursuits.

What about the person who would like to learn a bit about history here and there, but not necessarily become a historian? Or the person who wants to become a good surfer over the next half-decade?

Where does that fit into the picture? How does the autodidact organize their life of learning and assign each interest its rightful position in a hierarchy of attention?

The Lifelong Learning Compass framework is my answer to the predicament of wanting to learn everything but not having enough time or mental bandwidth to do so.

It’s essentially a blueprint you use to build a personalized 5-year self-education plan that balances your multiple interests across four critical dimensions of learning:

• Mastery: 1 craft, skill, or field you will try to master—for most people, this will be related to your dream career.

• Erudition: 3 fields of inquiry you will become well-read in (think self-chosen majors). This represents your reading life and intellectual cultivation.

• Range: 5 skills and subjects you will gain foundational competence in. You can think of this as your liberal arts base.

• Proficiency: The small and narrow topics you need or want to learn rapidly (like a new software for your job or a random deep dive into a current event). This is a space for just-in-time learning needs.

For example, here’s my current compass:

• Mastery: Creative Writing (Concentration: Novels and Substack Essays)

• Erudition: Autodidactism, Classic Literature, US History

• Range: Cooking (Focus: Mexican cuisine), Buddhism/Meditation, Long-Distance Running, The Great Books (Focus: political theory), Golf

• Proficiency: Follow curiosity and learn what I need for work, life, business, and writing projects.

I use my Lifelong Learning Compass as a prioritization tool—a reminder of what’s most important to me. As I descend the categories, from Mastery to Proficiency, I spend less time and intensity on the respective subjects and skills.

For example, I spend every day trying to get better at writing (my Mastery Discipline), but I might only spend a few hours per week on my Range Skills and Subjects like long-distance running and studying US history.

A ton of thought and reflection went into making my compass, but the act of building it really forced me to prioritize my interests in a way I never had before. And now, I have a clear vision of what’s most critical to me in my self-education, so I can make better decisions about how to spend my limited time—and waste far less of it.

If you want to use this technique, I wrote an entire ebook that teaches you my system and walks you through how to build your own personal Lifelong Learning Compass.

3. Find interactions between your interests

What if you could make progress on multiple interests simultaneously?

Not just on the same day or week, but in the exact same second—30 minutes progressing on two or three hobbies at the same darn time.

Well, you can. All you need is a project or activity that falls at the intersection of several of your interests.

Here’s a recent example from my own life:

Months ago, I launched a newsletter series called Thinkers where I write about the intellectual lives of history’s greatest thinkers. This project is partly an excuse to nerd out on three of my biggest interests at once: history, autodidactism, and essay writing.

So, are there any ways you can combine a few of your interests?

• Enjoy both history and running? Consider running while listening to history audiobooks or podcasts.

• Want to study both writing and literature? Start a Substack where you write personal/critical essays about the books you’re reading and the experiences you’ve had with them.

• Want to learn woodworking and art? Spend 20 minutes looking at and learning about art before heading into your workshop, where you’ll use the art as inspiration for the aesthetics of your creations.

This is not the easiest tactic to deploy, but if you can crack it, it’s a fantastically efficient way to cram more of your interests into your life without feeling overwhelmed. But if you get creative, you can likely find a way to connect at least a few of your interests into one exciting project.

As an added benefit, you may find—as I have—that the flow state you get from immersing yourself in multiple interests at once is incredibly strong, sort of like eating a tortilla chip slathered in queso, jalapeños, and a touch of hot sauce.

4. Plan your life around 12-week sprints

Recently, I ditched annual planning.

I was inspired by the book The 12 Week Year, especially this passage about the demotivating effects of annualized thinking:

“We mistakenly believe that there is a lot of time left in the year, and we act accordingly. We lack a sense of urgency, not realizing that every week is important, every day is important, every moment is important. Ultimately, effective execution happens daily and weekly!”

I started planning my life—and my self-education—around 12-week sprints. This timeframe is long enough that I can make serious progress on 1-3 learning/growth goals, and short enough that I don’t get restless or start to procrastinate.

If you’re someone who feels guilty about their neglected interests, this 12-week planning cycle might be much more psychologically manageable for you.

When you start to think about abandoning a project to go tackle another one, you can think to yourself, “I can do that interest next quarter. That’s not so far away! I can stick it out.”

So what goes into a 12-week self-education plan?

Here’s what my 12-week self-education plans typically include:

• 1 big, important, challenging self-education goal: Like teaching myself to write better prose, learning to make YouTube videos, or taking an intensive DIY course on some literary, historical, or philosophical topic. If you built a Lifelong Learning Compass, this big goal usually relates to your Mastery Discipline or Erudition Subject.

• 1 lighter, easier, for-fun self-education goal: Like doing a small topical reading project or getting a little better at a hobby. This lighter goal gives you a breather from your more demanding self-education project.

• Study plans to reach each goal: Identify the study materials and learning methods you will use to make progress on these two goals. I try to identify 2-3 study habits that will have the most bang for their buck. So, If my goal was to improve my prose, I might focus on copywork (hand-copying great writing) and writing (doing the skill is key!). If my goal was to understand War and Peace, the habits would be to read War and Peace, watch lectures on each chapter, and write nightly reflections in my reading journal.

After I’ve established the habits that will help me learn whatever I’m trying to teach myself, I hardcode them into a weekly autopilot schedule.

5. Create an autopilot schedule

Your autopilot schedule—something I learned about from Cal Newport’s blog post—is a weekly schedule for your recurring tasks and habits.

It’s essentially a reminder of what an ideal week looks like. You create it at the beginning of the 12-week period, and then use it as the template when you plan every new week’s schedule.

To illustrate, here’s mine for Summer 2026:

It might seem a bit boring to some to have all these blocks pre-planned, but I’ve found this extremely helpful for managing multiple interests and actually doing the things I want to do in life.

To create this autopilot schedule, think of the recurring tasks and habits that’ll help you achieve your 12-week goals, then assign each of those to a dedicated spot in your week.

That way, on any given day, you don’t have to decide when to do the habit.

You just know that every morning before work you read Shakespeare for 30 minutes, or that every night at 5 PM you play the piano, or that every Wednesday evening you sneak into your neighbor’s pig pen to practice hog wrestling since that’s the night he goes out drinking with his cousin Ray.

Obviously, you’ll tinker with your autopilot schedule quite a bit.

For example, I just switched my literature study from the morning to 2-3 PM during my afternoon break, because I found reading literature in the morning made me want to write literature, which I cannot afford to do when I have client work and Substack essays to write.

Over time, however, you’ll land on an autopilot schedule that helps you consistently complete your recurring tasks and habits necessary to make progress on your interests.

6. Strategically underperform in some areas

When I was interviewed for Petya K. Grady’s “The Reading Life” series, she asked me which responsibilities I neglect to spend so much time reading.

I think we all would benefit from pondering that question.

We should all ask ourselves what we are willing to sacrifice to pursue our most meaningful interests, and once we’ve identified them, to be okay with that decision, provided, of course, that the neglect isn’t hurting anyone—don’t ignore your wife for WW2 history!

As much as we wish we could do everything that calls to us, we just can’t. We have to get choosy, and if that means being below average at a few of your interests and hobbies so that you can achieve excellence in a few, I think that’s much better than being below average at all of them.

So pick some interests to half-ass.

Seriously. Accept that you’ll do them poorly or not get to them as often as you’d like.

For instance, I like to cook. I want to get better at it. But I don’t plan on becoming the next Gordon Ramsey. And if I skip a week of making an elaborate meal and just order Taco Bell for my wife and me every night, I’m not going to beat myself up over it—although, she might…

Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks, says to “decide in advance what to fail at.” A very wise statement that I think sums this technique up nicely.

This act of trategically underperforming in some areas allows you to overperform in the interests and projects that matter most to you.

Accept your limitations, and start prioritizing

It took me years of failing to complete self-education projects or gain any genuine expertise to finally admit that I had a problem of setting too many goals.

I was taking on more than I had the energy or time to handle.

Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks offers a salve to today’s busy, overwhelmed person—and that is to simply accept the fact that you will never be able to get to everything you want to get to.

He writes:

“It’s better to begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well.”

Applied to managing one’s interests, especially in the context of self-education, I take his advice to mean:

Accept that you will not be able to learn every subject or skill that you want to learn, and, on the micro level, that this quarter you will not be able to make significant progress on more than 1-2 big self-education or self-improvement goals.

If we try to become exceptional at everything, we’ll end up becoming exceptional at nothing. We need to focus on fewer things in general, and on only a few things at a time.

After you acknowledge this limitation, you can sort of reset your perspective.

You can start to really think long and hard about which few skills, subjects, and hobbies deserve priority status over the next few years, and which ones you’ll study for fun, occasionally, and without worrying too much about the results.

This facing up to facts leads to not only a more peaceful and fulfilling life, made up of attainable goals—it also counterintuitively results in a more productive one. You get more done when you do less.

Why?

When you narrow your focus to a handful of interests, you make more progress—more books read, more muscle on your shoulders, more words written, better finger dexterity on the guitar string, better field goal percentage—and this sense of progress motivates you to spend more hours on those interests!

Answer these questions

So, in closing, the questions to ask yourself really are:

• What interests matter the most to you?

• Which ones fill you with feelings of flow, meaning, and happiness?

• Which ones, if learned, will help you reach your life and career goals?

• Which ones feel more like obligations?

• Which ones can you strategically underperform in?

• Which ones can you drop completely?

Answer these questions, and use the techniques above, and you’ll get closer to becoming that badass polymath we all want to be, with a profound breadth of experience, skills, and knowledge.

Read The Lifelong Learning Compass

If you want to learn my 5-part system for planning a self-education that prioritizes your multiple interests and helps you acquire the skills and knowledge to reach the lifestyle you want, check out my new ebook, The Lifelong Learning Compass, or the ebook bundle (includes a 72-page workbook).

Happy studying,

Sam