Coaching practices for I'm Doing Twelve Things at a Passable Level and None of Them Well and I'm Starting to Think the Answer Isn't to Try Harder Across All of Them but to Do Far Fewer and Actually Be Good at Those
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For I'm Doing Twelve Things at a Passable Level and None of Them Well and I'm Starting to Think the Answer Isn't to Try Harder Across All of Them but to Do Far Fewer and Actually Be Good at Those, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’m doing twelve things at a passable level and none of them well, and I’m starting to think the answer isn’t to try harder across all of them but to do far fewer and actually be good at those.
- I’m chasing a dozen things I want to change all at once, so my effort gets spread paper-thin and everything stalls half-finished
- I’m spreading myself so thin across everything that nothing gets real traction
- I have eleven tabs open and four half-started things going at once, and I end the day exhausted with nothing actually finished
- I pour most of my effort into shoring up the things I’m bad at and it crawls
Practices that may help
- Less but better
Channel your effort into a few vital things done excellently rather than many done adequately.
Essentialism, Made Practical - Commit to only a few goals per cycle
Choose one to three goals for the 12 weeks so effort concentrates instead of scattering.
The 12 Week Year, Made Practical - Run two burners at high for a defined sprint
Pick two domains to maximize for a bounded period, and accept the other two will idle.
Four Burners Theory: Making Peace With Trade-Offs - Single-tasking on purpose
Do one thing at a time, fully, instead of half-doing several.
Slow Living, Made Practical - Invest more development effort in your strengths than in your weaknesses
Move from average to excellent in your strength areas rather than from poor to average in your weak ones.
Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical - Reject multitasking
Do one thing at a time — multitasking is switching, and switching is costly.
The ONE Thing, Made Practical - Limit how many you run at once
Keep to a handful of Objectives so the framework concentrates effort instead of scattering it.
OKRs for People, Not Just Companies - Decompose complex skills into learnable chunks
Break the overwhelming skill into named, discrete sub-skills and practice one at a time.
The Confidence–Competence Loop - Calibrate effort attributions carefully
Attribute failure to insufficient effort only when more effort was genuinely the variable — not as a substitute for honest strategy analysis.
Attributional Retraining, Made Practical - Ask the Focusing Question
“What’s the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”
The ONE Thing, Made Practical
Related concerns
- When Greasing The Groove Gtg For A Specific Strength Goal
GTG works through accumulated neurological specificity — spreading it across too many movements dilutes the signal.
Target GTG at one specific goal movement
- When Level 5 Leadership Hedgehog Concept
Identify the intersection of what you can be best at, what drives your economic engine, and what you are deeply passionate about.
Find your hedgehog concept — the one thing you can be best at
- When Four Burners Theory Two Burner Focus
Pick two domains to maximize for a bounded period, and accept the other two will idle.
Run two burners at high for a defined sprint
- When Okrs Limit And Focus
Keep to a handful of Objectives so the framework concentrates effort instead of scattering it.
Limit how many you run at once
- When The 12 Week Year Pick Few Goals
Choose one to three goals for the 12 weeks so effort concentrates instead of scattering.
Commit to only a few goals per cycle
- When The Zeigarnik Motivation Single Open Loop Focus
Limit yourself to one large incomplete project so the pull is focused, not scattered.
Keep only one major open loop at a time
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