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November 04, 2004
The way we complicate things
I live a very busy life. It wasn’t always like this, but sometimes it gets like this when I over-commit myself. It creeps up on me. It seems that I am a person that will fill up any and all available time. I do like to be active.
So it starts like this. I work all day, sitting in front of a computer so I decided I need to exercise more. So I get into cycling and pretty soon I’m committed to cycling. Physical exercise is kind of addicting and the better shape I get into, the more miles I can handle and the more fun it gets. This leads to greater commitments in order to challenge myself. That’s about 5 hours per week.
Then it continues to creep up on me. I start looking at a project to see if I can help someone edit their manuscript, and it’s fun, so I commit to doing the whole book. I start by spending one half hour per day on it, but it ends up being a major rewrite and I end up spending many more hours than planned. I decide that I can’t let the errors in the manuscript go and try harder to make it work. This adds about 5 hours per week to my schedule.
I start a class at the University at nights. It’s two nights per week, but the way the class is structured, it’s a huge amount of work. It requires a lot of my free time to study and do homework. That’s about 10 hours per week.
All of these are commitments I made, but it gets worse. So far, beyond my day job, I have added about 20 hours of work to my schedule. If I divide that between available evenings per week, that’s about 3 hours per night. Let’s say I get home from work at about 6pm, that makes it 9:00pm before I’m done. That doesn’t leave much time for other things, but there is a lot more.
All of these things are important to me, but there comes an overflowing point when I have too many things to do and not enough time. This is the way I complicate things. Then I have to start digging out of my commitment hole. To do so, I’ve had to cut back on some things to allow adequate time for others. I’ve also had to learn how to say no and how to schedule some things for another time. As much as I want to do some things, in the interests of maintaining a healthy balance in life, I just have to let some things go.
It’s really easy to over-commit and to fill up all of our available time. It all adds up. The difficult thing is to find that balance between work and rest. We do need both and we discover that finding balance is a recurring challenge in our lives.
Friday night and Saturday I’m taking a break from my normally busy schedule. You might catch me at the bookstore, going to a play and just laying around. :-)
Posted by carl1236 at November 4, 2004 11:09 PM | Balance