You have five projects on the go. Each one has a plan, tasks and a deadline. And by the end of the month only one has really moved — usually the one shouting loudest.
The cause lies in how those five projects coexist, not in how much work you can do.
Why five projects move less than three
Three mechanisms stack up, and none of them is about motivation.
The reloading cost. Picking a project back up means recovering where you'd got to, what was blocking, what you'd decided. The longer since your last visit, the longer that reload takes.
The permanent mental occupancy. An open project takes up room even when you're not touching it, and five open projects are five background processes running non-stop.
The repeated trade-off. Every time a slot frees up, you choose again what to work on. That decision is tiring, and it consistently leans towards what's urgent rather than what matters.
That's the reasoning behind the work-in-progress limit in Kanban. Capping what you carry at once shortens the time each thing stays in limbo, without taking anything away from what you produce.
Giving a project three states: active, asleep, closed
The classic mistake is to know only two states: in progress, or done. There needs to be a third.
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Active | It moves this week, it has a slot |
| Asleep | Nothing is happening, you've set it a wake-up date |
| Closed or dropped | It's finished, and you say so |
These three states are an organizing convention you hold yourself, not a status to tick in a tool. Putting a project to sleep is a decision, not a failure. What damages your organization is the project that's nominally active but where nothing is happening: it takes up a place and a share of your attention without giving anything back.
Hence the rule: a sleeping project must have a wake-up date. Without that date it's abandoned, even if nobody has said so out loud yet.
Three active projects, no more
If you have seven, four are already asleep without anyone saying it. Name them, and give them a date.
The next action, project by project
It's the highest-return principle borrowed from the GTD method, and it applies to every active project.
For each one, a single question: what is the very next concrete action? Not the next goal, but the next move, the one you can make without deciding anything else first.
A project with no identifiable next action is blocked, and what blocks it is almost always a pending decision rather than work to be done. Once you've spotted which one, it takes five minutes to make.
Reviewing every project once a week
A single check-in that goes through all your projects beats one meeting per project. It reveals the trade-offs between them, which siloed tracking never shows.
The run-through comes down to four questions per project.
- What has moved since last week? If the answer is "nothing", that's the first thing to deal with.
- What is the next action? It has to be named, not guessed.
- What's blocking it? Most often an outside dependency, or a decision you haven't made.
- Does it stay active this week? Three yeses maximum.
The full method is detailed in the weekly review.
Knowing which project is falling behind
The best health indicator for a project is the date of its last action.
A project with an impeccable plan that has produced nothing for three weeks is in trouble, whatever its percentage says. Conversely, a poorly documented project that moves every couple of days is doing fine.
It's also the kind of question an assistant connected to your projects answers in one sentence, without making you open five screens: you ask it for a status report, it gives you one. Running your projects by talking to your AI goes through these uses.
The projects that aren't projects
One last check, often a liberating one.
Some of the things we call projects are really single tasks in disguise, or wishes with no deadline and no recipient. The first kind get sorted in an hour and closed. The second have no business in a project tracker: they clutter the list and create a permanent sense of being behind.
Something deserves the name project when it takes several actions, in an order, towards an identifiable result. The rest is noise.
To structure each one, see getting started with projects, and to protect the time when they actually move forward, deep work: how to really concentrate.
Three active projects, and you know which ones.
