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What To Do When You Want To Do EVERYTHING

What To Do When You Want To Do EVERYTHING

Prioritization for those who are interested in too many things at once.

Marina Wyss
April 24, 2025

Welcome to Gratitude Driven, a weekly newsletter where I share practical ideas and insights across personal growth, professional development, and the world of AI and data science.

In This Newsletter

Doing Real ML Projects? Datalayer’s Got Power Tool …
What To Do When You Want To Do EVERYTHING
My Recent Content

Doing Real ML Projects? Datalayer’s Got Power Tools (and AI Agents!)

Let’s say you’re building a machine learning project that goes beyond a simple notebook. Your local setup isn’t cutting it, and Colab is annoying. But spinning up a cloud instance on AWS? Overkill 💵

This is where Datalayer comes in.

It’s a platform that gives you remote, scalable Jupyter runtimes (CPUs or GPUs!) that just work—no infrastructure stress. You can launch and manage them from your browser, JupyterLab, VS Code, or even the CLI. It feels like your usual workflow, but powered by cloud compute.

They've also recently added a Jupyter AI Agent that can create well-formatted Jupyter notebooks and generate code via text prompts. Datalayer can automatically allocate resources and remote runtimes to your Jupyter Notebooks based on your requirements.

🛠️ Some of the more advanced tools:

Secrets management (securely inject API keys)
Snapshots to save and reload runtime state
Persistent storage between sessions
CLI support for pro-level control
AI Agents! Just launched — they can spin up local Jupyter notebooks and generate code for you on the fly.

The team behind it is super friendly and shipping fast—so it’s a great time to get in early, try it out, and help shape what it becomes.

💻 Try Datalayer for free and unlock the full toolkit!

What To Do When You Want To Do EVERYTHING

I spent the last week and a half in Thailand with my husband, little sister, and Dad.

The sun was partially obscured by clouds and made this really cool effect.

We had a really lovely time. I deliberately didn’t bring my laptop, and I didn’t work on anything for my job, YouTube, side hustles… nothing at all.

I’m not one of those people who has trouble disconnecting. I don’t feel guilt about taking breaks, and work doesn’t occupy my mind too much when I’m taking time away. On the other hand, I do still find my brain percolating ideas in the background when I’m doing other things (which I suppose is kind of the point of deliberate time away).

The problem is, I have way too many things going on at any given time, and my brain starts to feel “messy” — for lack of a better word — when I spend too long away from the ability to take notes and keep track of everything.

To illustrate: If I had all the time in the world, here’s what I would be working on right now outside of my full-time job:

Personal goals around fitness/dance/other hobbies
Relationship maintenance and development (keeping in touch with friends and family and working on building a stronger local community)
YouTube (ongoing videos and leveling up everything from script writing to filming to editing and more)
Short-form content
Writing this newsletter and doing non-technical blogging on Medium
Writing a book (I have the idea, I just need time to make it happen…)
Mentoring
Personal learning outside of work (French, business, philosophy, marketing…)
Technical learning outside of work (technical books and courses)
Monetization stuff (working on merch, relationships with sponsors, digital products, etc.)
Managing the business side of things better
Making guided meditation tracks (I started this but had to deprioritize it, even though I’m still excited about the idea)
Building an AI travel app (I’ve had this idea for a while and I’d really love to make it a reality)
Re-do my kitchen and work on my backyard
Maybe have kids. Lol.

As you can see, I have A LOT of things that I am really passionate about. But no matter how productive I am, there’s no way to realistically make this all happen at the same time.

My Strategy for Handling Overwhelming Enthusiasm

Here's how I approach this "problem" (btw — I realize how lucky I am to have energy and opportunities and so much excitement about the world):

Brain dump everything onto paper. For me it really needs to be analog. I just write everything I want to do somewhat sorted into buckets.
Analyze each item. I write pros, cons, timeline thoughts — anything that's helpful for prioritization.
Align with my values. For each bucket/item, I think about how this aligns with my values and primary life objectives. Note that a prerequisite here is knowing your values and goals so you can have a very clear North Star.
Prioritize value-aligned tasks. Focus on those tasks that most clearly align with your values.
Make an explicit list of what you WON'T do. What are you willing to give up to achieve your goals?

I am really, insanely bad at the last point. I basically refuse to admit that I am a mortal with limitations on my time (sorry, Oliver Burkeman). This is something I am still actively working on figuring out. How can I be okay with my limitations and what I have to give up? How can I accept that I cannot do everything at once?

This is something I will be meditating on for the foreseeable future. And true to form, I just caught myself thinking, "Maybe I'll make a guided meditation about accepting limitations, or perhaps this could be a chapter in my book!" See the problem? Even when discussing how to manage too many interests, I'm generating more ideas. 🫠

I'll keep you all updated on my journey toward more peaceful prioritization. In the meantime, I'd love to hear how you manage your own competing passions and interests! Reply to this email and let me know.