They say a change is as good as a rest, and I’ve found that’s often true. Why else would we take vacations?

Okay, given some of the vacations I’ve been on, that might not be the best example. They usually involve cross-country road trips to see family. Interesting, and sometimes fun, but not exactly restful.

I think the proverbial ‘they’ are talking about the types of variety that don’t completely upend your routine, but do give you a different thing to work on during the time designated for work, or a different form of relaxation on your off-time.

When I started getting into writing in a more serious fashion, not just the occasional snippets of story that attacked me, I found that it was easier to write every day, keeping the habit going, if I had multiple projects going at once. If I found myself blocked on one, I could switch to another, and make progress on that one. There was a slight chance that I’d drop a project on the floor for too long, and it’d never get finished, but that was rare. Sometimes the effect was more subtle; I’d work on a project for a week, find my progress slowly diminishing, and switch, then make a ton of progress in one day.

Then life got complicated- was 2020 simple for anybody?- and my stable of rotating projects lost some of its get-up-and-go. For a while, I mostly worked on one project at a time, with some little blips of variety from blog posts. It kept things ticking over in my brain, without a lot of forward progress.

Eventually I got frustrated with that and started my substack, The Wordsmith’s Forge, last September. What can I say?- I’m a slow learner. But it gave me a reason to finish projects, to have more than one going at a time, and practice turning out a story when I needed one, not just when I felt like it.

And in the usual way of things, a little progress in one thing generates a feed-forward mechanism, and for the past little while, I’ve been able to rotate between at least two and usually more projects without dropping one.

Don’t get too excited; I’m not going to suddenly start turning out 10,000 words a day. There’s just not enough hours for all that typing, plus all the other stuff sitting on my plate. I’ve also gotten a reminder that sleep is really important- essentially, I had a cold, took something for it that let me sleep, did that for a few nights, and noticed a dramatic uptick in my daily word count, despite being sick. It’s almost like this stuff is complicated, and what worked a month ago might not work today.

Keeping a bunch of plates spinning isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it’s pretty dang entertaining, if one can manage it.

I know some of you are single-project workers and some are more like me. Do you ever switch habits? How much change is too much, and throws you off? How much is too little?