I am often asked, “How do you manage to juggle everything?” Managing multiple projects requires organization, discipline, focus, and frustration tolerance.

Entrepreneurs juggle many hats. Customers, sales, investors, finance, employees — everybody wants your attention.

On top of that, many entrepreneurs have families, and surprisingly, many entrepreneurs are involved in volunteer work in addition to their daily grind.

I think I fit this pattern pretty well. Besides being the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, my wife and I are raising three kids, I’m an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, and I serve as a volunteer on two school boards.

I am often asked, “How do you manage to juggle everything?” This article aims to share some of my practices to manage my daily life.

Before you continue, it’s important to understand two things: First, I’m not superhuman. Everyone can learn the practices outlined below. And second, building practices takes time. Just as getting rich quickly won’t work, developing those practices quickly won’t work.

1. Get Organized

First and foremost, you need to get organized when you want to juggle multiple projects and activities. Over the years, I have developed a planning system using Asana to stay on top of things.

This system keeps me out of delays and urgencies, as it helps me work on tasks well before their deadlines. In this way, I’m not getting off the track when an unforeseen urgency hits my desk. And yes, unforeseen urgencies happen more often than I’d like them to happen.

2. Discipline

Getting and staying organized requires discipline. Everything I need to do has an Asana task in my planning system. Even if I’d love to have an empty task list in Asana, I’ve gotten used to a never-ending stream of tasks.

Discipline is needed not just for getting and staying organized. When you’re involved in multiple projects, sometimes you’ll have to squeeze in meetings at odd times in far-flung places to make everything add up. That means getting up early or getting home late. Sometimes I feel like cancelling that last meeting halfway across the country, or not getting out of bed in the morning. But if you choose the path of being involved in multiple activities, you have to be ready to grit your teeth now and then.

3. Focus

Being involved in multiple projects sounds like anti-focus. It’s not; multiple projects have a stimulating effect on each other: Activities in one domain can result in innovative solutions in another, seemingly unconnected domain.

But focus is still important, albeit in a different form than you might think: Do one thing at a time. Don’t sit in a business meeting and answer emails from your volunteering work. Don’t sit at the family table and slack with your work colleagues. Discipline yourself to separate your different activities. It’s better to invest a short, focused period of time into one of your activities and then switch to the next, rather than trying to do everything all the time.

4. Frustration Tolerance

I admit it, it’s not always fun to juggle multiple activities. Things can go wrong in each of your activities, and they seldom go wrong in sequence. Usually, they all go wrong at the same time. That’s when your tightly packed schedule explodes, multiple people try to call you, and you don’t know what to do first. I call those days Shit Days.

When a Shit Day happens, get over it quickly. Shit days are a reality, and they shouldn’t divert too much energy from you.

Whenever I’m frustrated, I try to pull myself out of frustration as quickly as possible by remembering the purpose of all my activities. I chose all my activities deliberately, and I fully stand behind the purpose each serves.

5. Enjoy

Last but not least, you need to enjoy all the activities you’re involved in. That makes everything easier, even if you suffer the occasional Shit Day.