The Minimum Effective Dosage - What is Yours?

Credit: RonnieB at Morguefile.com

I have lots of projects in my head, in the garage, in boxes, even on Pinterest, that I want to do. I hang on to some of them way too long thinking I'll "get around to them." Something always gets in the way, and the projects keep getting pushed back.

My friend, Angela England, who I've known since my Suite101 days, is an awesome blogger. I would say mommy blogger, but she is so much more. With 5 kids, she manages to, with the help of her husband, take care of five kids, an urban homestead, a personal blog with a multitude of contributors, contribute to Blissfully Domestic, and run I've lost count of how many social networking pages, sites and communities. I don't see how she does it, but she's much younger than I am, so that may have something to do with it. When you have kids, you just do what you have to do.

So Ang had a Google+ hangout the other night on the spur of the moment. Not many of us were able to show up, but she recorded it for us and put a post up on her Ang England blog.  You can find the post and video HERE and join the discussion.

The basis of the discussion is the question what is the your effective minimum dosage for your projects? When is a project not worth the time expended? She uses the example of many of her blogger friends (including me) shutting down their blogs. Some of them just imported their posts to her blog so they would still be online, some left them up not updated (me) and some closed them altogether. I've opened and closed so many blogs, I can't count. I really identify with this, because although I loved the Simply Deb blogs, at this time in my life, there simply isn't enough reward for the time I would have to put in to make them into what I originally wanted them to be. I make no money from them, although I'm sure I could if I had time to monetize them, but the initial work involved in setting that up just does not have a good cost/reward ratio.

This also goes along with my cutting out a lot of my social networking, actually closing down some of my profiles on sites that weren't delivering enough reward for the time I was putting in, as I explained in detail in a recent Yahoo article.

My 30-Day Social Media Vacation

For my projects, I have gained the insight to look at something and say "Is that really worth my time?" This is a valuable tool when I'm thrift shopping or see something on the curbside trash that would be awesome with "just a little work." Right now, I'm focused on making money, so I look at each thing and think of the time, money and effort it will take and how much money I could be earning while I was doing that. There are always thrift store and curbside treasures, and I haven't found one lately I couldn't live without, which is a huge change from when I had a 3 BR house and garage to stash my junk in. Can you say HOARDER? Yep, that's me, and I wrote about that too.

Confessions of a Recovering Hoarder

To me, determining the minimum effective dosage of time and effort to put into a project is directly related to return. If I'm going to resell something, and feel confident I can get a good return on my time and investment, I may take that on. If it's just for me, and I just don't have the time, it may get passed by -- or shoved to the back of the pile with all my other "eventually" projects. I actually have sold or given away  a lot of my project possessions in the past years, because I knew that there just wasn't enough time or money to do anything with them. I have a few more I am going to be selling as well.

How do you determine how much time and effort is reasonable and achievable in order to make a project "doable?"  It's a good question and I thank Angela for asking it. It's especially relevant to those of us trying to downsize and simplify our lives.