All of us who live in large residential societies know that WhatsApp group where the messages never seem to stop.

Someone has parked in somebody else’s parking spot. Someone has brought a ferocious-looking dog into the smaller passenger lift. A group of children has damaged the common lawn. Someone is complaining about the security guards. Someone else is asking whether the water supply has been restored.

And then there are the less contentious messages. Someone has brought mangoes from their farm and is taking orders. Someone is selling homemade pickles. Someone announces that they are taking orders for chilli chicken.

We can’t really ignore the group. After all, these are our neighbours.

One day, amidst this endless stream of messages, I noticed a curious advertisement for singing classes in our society. I casually mentioned it to my wife and moved on. She didn’t and said, “Why don’t you join? You love singing. You love songs.”

My immediate response was simple: “I can’t. My hands are already full.”

I was already pursuing several things. I didn’t want to become one of those people who spreads themselves too thin by taking on one more interest, one more project, one more goal.

Then, almost as an afterthought, I said, “Wait. I think I could do it.”

What made me change my mind? It wasn’t that I suddenly discovered I had more time. It wasn’t that I had decided to abandon the other things I was doing. Something else had occurred to me.

But to explain that, I need to go back a little.

We often talk about productivity as if the problem is simply a shortage of time. There is always something else we want to do. So we look for ways to squeeze more out of the day. We try to become more efficient. All of that can help. But there is a point beyond which productivity techniques cannot solve the problem. At that point, perhaps the problem isn’t how we use our time, but what we are trying to accomplish with that time.

The idea that we cannot pursue everything at once is hardly new. In Essentialism, Greg McKeown makes the point vividly by describing the futility of making “just a millimetre of progress in a million directions.” The essentialist approach is to make deliberate choices about what is truly important and focus our efforts accordingly.

I have seen a tendency in many people I work with. I sometimes describe them as Octopus personas. Like an octopus with its many arms reaching in different directions, they have numerous goals, projects and ambitions competing for their attention. They aren’t necessarily lazy or disorganized. Quite often, they are energetic, capable people who are genuinely interested in many things. The problem is that their ambitions exceed their available resources.

One useful way of making this visible is time budgeting. When we actually allocate the available hours to our various goals, the arithmetic can be revealing. There simply isn’t enough time to make meaningful progress on everything.

The general lesson, therefore, is fairly straightforward:

We should have a small number of carefully selected goals that we are genuinely prepared to pursue.

But there is another question that is less often discussed. Even after we have reduced our goals to a manageable number, are those goals compatible with one another? That is the question I want to explore here.

Having multiple goals isn’t necessarily a problem. In fact, some goals can reinforce each other.

The reason I eventually said yes was that singing wasn’t really going to be one more thing on my already crowded list. It connected with something I was already trying to accomplish.

As a productivity coach, I have always wanted to improve my speaking voice. Speaking is central to my work—whether in coaching sessions, presentations, workshops, or simply communicating ideas. In my search for ways to develop my voice, I came across Voice and the Actor. Interestingly, the book suggested that learning to sing could be an effective way to develop the voice.

Suddenly, singing didn’t look like another goal competing for my time. It looked like a way of pursuing two goals together.

So an attempt to become a better speaker eventually led me to take up singing—bringing two seemingly different goals together. That’s a very different situation from having two goals that pull us in opposite directions.

Imagine training to be a sumo wrestler and a race jockey. There is nothing inherently wrong with either goal. But the physical characteristics and training requirements that help you progress toward one may work against what you need for the other. No amount of time management completely eliminates that conflict. Of course, this is an exaggerated example. But real life contains much subtler versions of the same problem.

We may want to:

  • build a demanding business while pursuing several equally demanding side projects;
  • become an expert in one field while simultaneously trying to master another;
  • maximize income while deliberately reducing the amount of time we spend working;
  • write a book while taking on several other major creative commitments.

Each goal may make perfect sense on its own. The difficulty appears when we put them together.

It helps to think about goals in three broad categories.

1. Complementary goals

These goals help each other.

My singing and speaking goals are an example. The time and effort I put into developing my voice can contribute to both objectives.

When goals are complementary, pursuing one can help you make progress toward another. This is a wonderful form of leverage.

2. Independent goals

Some goals don’t help each other, but they don’t interfere with each other either.

You might want to learn photography and improve your swimming. Neither has much to do with the other, but there is no fundamental contradiction between them.

If you have enough time and energy, you can pursue both.

3. Conflicting goals

Then there are goals where progress toward one can make the other more difficult.

This is where we need to be careful.

The conflict doesn’t necessarily mean that one of the goals is bad. It means that pursuing both simultaneously may have a cost that we haven’t accounted for. And that cost may show up as time, energy, money, attention—or simply the inability to make meaningful progress on either.

Thus, before adding another significant goal, it is worth asking a few questions:

  • Does this goal support something else I am already trying to achieve?
  • If it doesn’t, is it at least neutral?
  • Does pursuing it consume resources that another important goal needs?
  • Are two goals demanding fundamentally different things from me?

Sometimes we discover that two goals can coexist beautifully. And sometimes we discover that we are trying to train for the productivity equivalent of being both a sumo wrestler and a race jockey.

And we need to take a step back.

Because productivity isn’t only about doing more with the time we have. Sometimes it is about choosing goals that allow our efforts to work together rather than against each other.

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