March 04, 2002

Posted by on Mar 4, 2002 in General Writing

Since Friday, I have been thinking constantly about focus; how to focus and what to focus on. I’ve actually had a hard time focusing on focusing.

I’ve got so many different projects going on at the moment that I’m starting to sink. In the corporate world I was known as the juggler – the girl who could take on a million projects and balance them all perfectly and produce the utmost satisfying results. Yet now with all my projects, I’m disorganised, overwhelmed, confused and for the first time falling behind.

This morning I realised the reason why I’m not balancing everything as well as I did at my corporate job is because with writing, everything seems important to me. Every task I feel is the most important and deserves all my attention. Each project that I take on I am passionate about and so all my efforts go full throttle into each and every thing I do. In the corporate world, not everything mattered so not everything got the same level of importance, therefore it was easier to prioritise.

So today I was trying to figure out, out of everything I am doing what is it that I really want to do. What area of writing is important to me? The area I’ve always wanted to write in most is in travel because that is my passion. But I haven’t been sure how to go about doing travel writing so instead I focused all my writing efforts elsewhere.

Elsewhere ended up being a very big place. I wasn’t sure where to focus my efforts because nothing struck me as the one area I wanted to write for, so I wrote for every place and became overwhelmed.

I thought I had given up on travel writing for the time being, but it has always been in the back of my mind and today, I realised that I’ve actually done little bits to put me in the travel direction.

I’ve planned a trip this month to write about, I’ve planned a summer trip to write about, I’ve been working on my travel portfolio and I’ve been finding magazines to write for. I’m giving a talk on Thursday about travel and adventure and I was even bold enough to email a hotel I am staying at and told them I was a travel writer and requested a “media package” to help with my article.

All this travel writing has been done in my “free time” as though it was a hobby, yet that is the area that I really want to work in. I don’t know why I did that. Perhaps I thought I should continue with the inspirational writing that I’ve done because that’s all that I used to do and people like it. Perhaps it was scary for me to try a new direction or do something that people weren’t ready for. Maybe I was afraid of a challenge – I’m not sure.

But today when my media package arrived, I was giddy down to my toes. I was excited, I felt like a real travel writer and my mind started to focus on what to do next, how to write about travel and the possibilities that all this can lead to. It made me feel happy and it made me feel like I’ve found the area that I want to be in.

So then, I’ve decided to focus my efforts into my travel writing. Since much of that kind of writing can only be done once I travel, I decided that in the meantime I will continue to write articles about the ordinary being extraordinary. And when I’m not writing about that I will continue to promote and work on the Another Girl at Play site.

I figure that makes my plate all about full – but I think I can finally chew it all because I now understand each bite.