How to Do It All
(When You Want to Do
All The Things)

You can’t do it all.

Ugh.

I hate hearing those words.

Which is why I keep most of my dreams to myself.

Seriously. If people knew even the half of what I actually want to accomplish in this lifetime, they would be legitimately concerned.

But is the old saying true? Is it impossible for me to “do it all”? Or is it possible for me to do all things?  

Between my next new fabulous idea, the current novel I’m working on, marketing, everyday life challenges, and my never-ceasing passion to press into the next thing God is doing with His people: whew, there is a LOT going on in my brain! 

So, how is a girl supposed to do "all the things"? is that even possible? And if it is, how in the world are we going to pull it off?

Before diving in to explore and answer these Q's, I want to give a little bit of backstory on my personality to help frame what I’ll be sharing. Because you have to understand a few things about me.

First of all, I love diversity! I love having my hands in a variety of projects. I have a passion for several different industries, countries, and people groups, and if it were humanly possibly, I would most definitely want to be at two different places at once!

We see this best displayed on the playground, when I was in First Grade. I wanted to play with everyone. The nerdy Star Wars kids, the popular kids on the slide, the outcasts by the swings, the imaginative girls who pretended to be magical horses saving the world, and even the wimpy Kindergartners! (And let me tell you, nobody wanted to play with the Kindergartners.) But I had the grand idea that everyone should be friends, and that I should know and be a part of every single one of these social circles! 

I remember calculating how many minutes we had in recess and how much time I could spend with each group before the bell rang. When we were supposed to be doing math problems right before recess, I was busy in my mind, planning out how I would spend my day.

I made a mental schedule instead of focusing on my math homework. (Oops.) 

Monday’s and Wednesday’s: Star Wars kids and Horse girls.

Tuesdays and Thursdays: Ten minutes with the Kindergartners, five minutes on the slide...

I was trying so hard to figure out how I could do, well... everything.  

Thankfully, my endeavors were successful and all my crazy planning and scheming led to some seriously happy times on the playground. I was friends with everyone in the lower elementary, and somehow managed a thriving social schedule! Pretty impressive for a six-year-old!

Clearly, this had to be some sort of God-given, innate, mental planner built into me, because I was not taught how to do this. Just ask my Mom, she’ll be the first to admit that she is organizationally challenged.

I know now, after years of taking many, many personality tests, that this is pretty classic behavior for an INFP. According to the Enneagram, I’m a type 7, who struggles with this little thing called Fear of Missing Out. And it’s true. As a kid, I wanted to be friends with everyone and do everything. 

I was homeschooled from third grade on. One year I thought it would be fun to have a party with both my homeschooled friends, and my public school friends. Sounds pretty harmless, right?

Well, I had yet to understand that the cultures between my homeschooled friends and my public school friends were quite different. I was new to the whole modesty-long-jean-skirt wearing, no-listening-to-secular-music thing, and didn’t know that those were the convictions of many of my homeschooled friends.

So when I brought my public school friends into the mix who wanted to listen to the latest Kids Bops, dance around, and bounec off the walls with crazy amounts of energy, this brought on some very awkward moments!

I have sense learned that not everyone has the same desire to throw a bunch of people with radical differences into a room and see what happens. (Ha, maybe that’s why I became a writer! So I could experiment with crazy social scenarios!) Anyway, I think that last party is a pretty good picture of what can happen when we try to do too many things all at once. 

Just like in baking, some ingredients mix really well together. But if they don’t have that natural synergy, and you try to put 2 or 3 things together that just do NOT mix...look out, your cookies are going to taste totally gross. 

So what about the cookies of life? How can I find a recipe where I can mix a BUNCH of fun ingredients together, and do all my favorite things, pursuing the dreams God has placed inside my heart, without having them totally flop and create one big, epic fail? 

Well, my friends, I am about to give that recipe to you.  

That’s right. I have discovered the secret.

You can do everything!

But what you can’t do is all the things...all at the same time.

Ecc. 3:1 says “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” 

Not just some purpose. Every purpose. Meaning, that if God has purposed for this thing to happen in your life, it can and WILL come to pass, if you partner with Him in His desire to manifest it.

But, it’s not all going to happen at the same time.

Okay, ready for that secret recipe? I'm so excited to walk you through my crazy effective, five-step process that I use to get everything done! 

I'll be sharing that in my next post, My 5 Step Plan to Neverland.

Or if you'd rather can listen to this post via audio: it's actually one of our Podcast episodes! How cool is that? Take a listen here! 

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