But you’re an entrepreneur and you realize that focus is finite. Every single day you are trading your time in for the hope that whatever project you are currently working on will be worth the effort. You’re giving up all of the other fantastic ideas swimming around in your skull for a bet — the bet that this project is the one that will make it or at the very least it will lead you to The One.

Morpheus would be proud.

I am an entrepreneur and I live with these kinds of choices everyday. This week Forbes asked me how I deal with them and what time-saving tips I had to give myself more bandwidth.

Let’s start with the first. Deep down inside I wish I could do everything. I have three moleskines filled with interesting, world changing (ahem) ideas that I would love to create. It breaks my heart that so many of them have to wait in line as I work on nurturing my current projects.

What gets me through the day is understanding that just because a project is on the shelf, doesn’t mean that I am not working on it. I am constantly surprised by how many times my current projects spill over into an idea I had months ago, how often the focus I’m devoting to one thing leads to the breakthru I needed for another. It’s important as entrepreneurs to recognize the links between the things that we create, and to be open to the fact that sometimes the best thing you can do for your nascent ideas is to leave them alone for a while, finish off what you are currently working on and come back to them with fresh eyes.

To do this effectively, you need to be able to manage your time. If you are spending a lot of your time running around in circles doing the same things over and over again, not only will it be harder for you to finish your current project but it will be more difficult to capture all of the information that you could use to better your future ones.

Everyone’s organizational style is different, but since I occasionally get asked how I stay organized I wanted to tell you that story and see if it helps.

Everything in my day comes in through Postbox, the only email client I’ve ever used for more than 5 days on a stretch. It’s clean, it’s simple and I love it. I’ve described previously how I deal with email, so I won’t do that again but after it leaves my box it ends up in Chandler — a fantastic opensource scheduling and to-do list. It’s a desktop client, which I need because there is something about keeping my To-Dos in the cloud that makes it impossible for me to give them sufficient weight. Using both of these tools produces a single path between email and action, and has easily cut days of procrastination out of my life.

Ideas are another story, for those I use a combination of Moleskine’s (or Piccadillys which are much cheaper), Notepad++ and Dia. If you haven’t tried Notepad++ and you use Windows, you should. It is a multi-tab, multi-pane notepad replacement that has syntax highlighting for everything from C to Matlab. I always have a few tabs open to take notes on concepts of interest. Once those coalesce into an idea, they go into Dia, the best flowcharting and mindmapping program I’ve ever used (and I’ve used quite a few). It is simple, powerful and makes it easy to visualize concepts and find the holes. Before I got these tools, I’d spend hours tracking down scraps of paper and going through files looking for that clever thing I thought up at 4AM that one night.

There are dozens of other little tricks I use to save time and manage my focus, and the best advice I could give to any entrepreneur is take the time to find the one’s that work for you. It’s almost never the tools themselves, but how they work within your style of business that matter.

Wait, I forgot, didn’t I start off talking about focus?

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