Tool: The Carousel, a tool for those with lots of projects

"What do you do? I hate that question! " I was intrigued.

During an online Creators Club meeting, the lovely Sarah Weiler gave us an insight into her inspiring ideas and theories, including her ‘Carousel check-in tool’; a helpful tool for anyone with multiple interests and projects!

But why does she dislike this question?

"Explaining who I was, was hard because I was doing so many things…", Sarah tell us. She goes on to exemplify this with a display of an impressive variety of paid and voluntary projects that she is involved with. She is creator and presenter of the ‘Quitting Quadrant’ - about knowing when to quit, a stand up comedian, TEDx speaker and founder of Power of Uke, where the ukulele is used as a team building tool in corporations like Google. Immediately, we got a much better picture of who Sarah was.

I, like Sarah, have many interests, projects and ideas on the go or in my mind. At times, these ideas all surface at once and I dump them in a mind map, excited by all the possibilities. A day later, I’m usually overwhelmed by feeling I want to do them all and, by seeing the benefit of them all, feeling that I should do them all…which is when I know something isn’t quite right.

This is where the Carousel comes in! The tool makes us position our projects or ideas into six areas from resting at the back, furthest away from us and out of focus, to being what we are focusing on right now, and then the transition stages.

I grabbed my coloured pens and in a few minutes had my own Carousel mapped in front of me. I used an article she had written as a guide. Read it here. 

It was a very simple exercise but incredibly helpful. It provided a structure and framework in which to organise my ideas and, as a result, helped me to feel calmer and less chaotic. Resting some of my ideas at the back of the carousel was very satisfying. Doing this, I felt I was acknowledging that now was not the right time to work on them. Equally, by placing them there I knew that they were just temporarily parked. One day, when the energy is right, they’ll swing back around and into focus. They needn’t be forgotten, they’re just resting. 

Recognising this, frees me to give more energy to those projects I truly want to focus on right now, knowing that at some point they will probably rest at the back.

The fluidity and flexibility of the framework reflects the fluidity of life.  As humans, we don’t fit neatly into single boxes and labels. We hold multiple roles and flow into varying categories across a day, week and lifetime. We may be a parent, a project manager, a choir conductor, a weekend cricket player and have a growing expertise on bread baking. Answering the question, ‘what do you do?’, in one or two words, seems to hardly do this wonderful list justice!

Sarah offered an interesting alternative to this question, ‘what excites you most at the moment?’ which is perhaps another way of saying, ‘what is at the front of your Carousel now? What are you focusing on?’. Would these alternative questions help us to share with others what we really want to be identified as at that moment? Would this help to spark more interesting conversations? Perhaps.

Thank you, Sarah, for sharing this model with us all. I will definitely be revisiting the Carousel exercise in future, both to see how mine has changed and to restructure my, sometimes chaotic, ideas.

 

Sarah Weiler was a guest speaker at a Creators Club online meeting. Creators Club is a vibrant community of creatives, freelancers, small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs.