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How many projects can you handle at once?

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In other words... what are your capabilities?

What are your multi-project management skills?

Because I feel like people like Marc Lou or Levelsio do a lot of them and as solo founders, they are pretty fast and versatile (but they probably delegate some things to other freelancers - that's my guess).

How many projects can you handle at once? Either solo or together?

For example, I was handling 5 or 6 at one time, but it soon took its toll on my health. When it struck, I didn't care about project anymore.

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Same here at certain point of time i was handling multiple teams and product lines within those team , it got to point where I couldn’t focus anymore , so now trying to keep it one max two at same time !

 How did you distance yourself from those remaining projects?

well it was not easy as it was from work ! To be honest i hit the wall and I reported this to upper management as it was affecting the work , i was lucky to have good manager who worked with me and we started by reducing some projects directly and then delegating some of my work ! It is good to be in country( Sweden)in such case where these kind of situations with employees are taken seriously :) With sometime off and some exercise/ meditation i was back and started taking back some of the work but since then i am always aware of this feeling . Fast forward to now i still work with same company but now i can feel i have enough in me to even do my own startup on the side , it has actually helped me as a creative outlet !
I tried to limit it to 2 :) It’s not always possible but I find it beneficial for productivity. Because we can only be thinking about/working on 1 thing at a time anyway. I keep a second one there when I get bored or stuck on this one

 What are those 2 things? :)

 basically just two projects, like two research projects or one research one app. Sometimes, even two studies in one project if the scope is large. I find it difficult to keep more than two ongoing because they just bug me in the background when I am not working on them, which drives me crazy if there are too many (>2:).

Realistically, I work best focusing on a single project at a time so it gets my full attention. When I'm juggling several, I tier them by priority, but I've noticed the quality slips because each one pulls focus from the others.

At the end of the day, there's a huge difference between how many I can handle and how many I should take on to do the work well. It also just depends on the scope of the project and the timeline I'm working with.

 not only timeline, but intensity, it is nothing worse when everybody wants everything :D

Technically, you can only work on 1 at a time.

Those people like Marc look like they have 10 going on at the same time,

actually only work on 1 product per work session (as discussed in his youtube vid).

So, I wouldn't compare multi-tasking skills with anybody. It seems like it's just a matter of speed (ie. the faster you finish one project, the faster you can move on to the next)

 Okay, so it is more about acting fast on one front so you can move on faster on another, gotcha :)

I'd say 3. And I think it's helpful to ensure they are differentiated from each other so you can have different levels of thought when working on them. Example, I would not want to build 2 finance companies simultaneously.

 It depends. Because yes, it would cause "stealing" ideas from one to add them to another. On the other hand, when you are really good in some industry/area, you are more likely to know how to handle this problem.

one, focus is too important to succeed

 This is inspiration I should follow :)

I operate quite a few projects, plus the business itself, and it's not so difficult if you learn to identify what's important now, ie set priorities for the day, and reshuffle if there is a fire!

Make sure YOU are a priority - time to exercise, meditate, eat/stay hydrated - they should be on your list (BTW there are different forms of meditation, and I do mine while running, as well as problem solving).

 Happy you mentioned the second point, lately I started noticing losing myself.

 This is the exact problem I built FounderFlow to solve, after running a software company, a care home, and a cafe at once, identifying what's important now was the hardest part because everything competed equally for attention. Would love to hear how you reshuffle when there's a fire, open to a quick call if you're up for it.

What's interesting is nobody's mentioned the version of this where it's not multiple projects but one project pulling you in five directions. Right now I'm not running multiple startups, I'm running one, but between product, support, and trying to get the word out across different channels, it feels a lot like the multi-project problem people are describing here. Same answer though, I've had to accept that doing fewer channels well beats doing all of them halfway.

 Wait – are you experiencing those 5 things within one project? Or do you have 5 different projects and each of them requires that support, marketing etc? Because that would be a different lvl :D

I've managed around 4 projects simultaneously. What this experience taught me is that the most important thing is not time management, but ecosystem thinking. When you work on multiple unrelated projects, your energy gets divided. Each project needs its own vision, marketing, audience, and strategy. Over time, that becomes exhausting. What worked for me was treating the projects as parts of a larger ecosystem. They shared the same long-term vision, the same learning process, and often the same marketing and business strategy. This creates focus instead of fragmentation. Progress in one project helps the others. The audience, knowledge, and credibility you build can benefit the entire ecosystem. For startups, I think the goal should not be to manage more projects. The goal should be to build projects that reinforce each other and contribute to a long-term vision. That's what makes multiple projects sustainable over time.

 The most crucial thing is to have enough energy to function. It really doesn't pay off when your health stops working.

I think people often confuse "having multiple projects" with "making progress on multiple projects."

Most of the founders who seem to be juggling 5-10 things aren't actually giving equal attention to all of them. Usually there's one primary project, a few that are in maintenance mode, and maybe one new experiment.

The real bottleneck isn't time. It's context switching.

I've found that once a project starts living in my head when I'm trying to work on another one, I'm already over capacity.

 I would like to add that context switching causes that you need an additional 20 minutes to refocus. Not very effective :)

 This is the best framing in the thread. Context switching is the actual tax, not the raw count of projects. I run three businesses and the moment I noticed I was over capacity was when I started re-explaining the same situation to myself in my own head every time I switched.

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