Oh man, where does all the time go? It's my little girls first day at big school today. My little girl who's not so little anymore at the big school that will get smaller the longer she is there. I know this for a fact because other little girl who is now much bigger is in her last year there. When smaller person leaves, it will be 2017 and older small person will be 20. Five years that will no doubt shoot past in the blink of an eye. Which got me to thinking, what am I going to do in those five years? So I made a plan - a list of lists if you will. It's frightening how much you think can get done in five years - but only when you look back on the last five years and realise how much you had planned and didn't get done. Which calls for a new way of thinking.
It seemed smart to me to figure out why the things I really wanted to do never happened. The things that did happen, happened and are out in the world taking care of themselves, so they're not a concern. But why do things fall through the net? The first port of call is to take an average day/week/month and see where time was wasted - man, there's a lot of it. TV is the biggest enemy, but I began to address that a little while back. With the assistance of a little technology, I now watch TV when I want to watch it instead of when TV wants me to. I've found that I can do quite a lot of other things during this block too. You can fill the washing machine, successfully plan out a magazine, go through the days scraps of paper, delete a ton of emails via a separate device.. it's a long list these days and (so long as your not watching something like Spiral with fast moving subtitles), you don't really miss much. The only time I ever sweep the decks, turn off the phone and something on TV has my full attention is when Doctor Who is on. 50 minutes of a week. I think that's allowed.
This train of thought is a work in progress as the more I do it, the more I find myself syphoning out the shows that aren't worth spending time with.
Something else that's been worth doing - and this happened by accident - is a self imposed media blackout. I don't read newspapers or watch the news ever. If something important happens, you pick it up soon enough from breezing through the day. This doesn't include magazines though. They have a new way of 'being' around here. If it's not available for the iPad, it does't get bought. The very few magazines that I do respect are now on a digital subscription and get read or flicked through during this TV block. If there's something worth reading properly, it gets earmarked and digested properly during other dead times. This is a far cry from a couple of years back when it was actually painful to tip many years worth of magazines into the crusher. Do I miss them? Hell, I can't even remember what they were.
I'm getting there with this. The result is that the end of the day is stuffed with outside influences and then I go to sleep. It's worth bearing in mind here that I go to bed between 1 and 2am and get up about 7am. That's enough for me based on a very simple idea.
1. Never go to bed in the same day you got up in.
So much time is wasted by being asleep when you don't need that much. Out of everybody I know, I am the only person who does this. On average, my day has three to four extra hours in it than everybody else. On the outside, that's an extra 28 hours a week, which by my reckoning makes my week eight days long. A whole extra 52 days a year over my peers. That's a lot of time - and sure, it doesn't really make an eight day week but as with everything in life, it doesn't really matter what the reality of the situation is, only what you think the reality of the situation is.
With all this written down, I feel pretty good (it's actually a really difficult thought process to write all of this down) but despite lists, plans, good intentions and smart thinking on my behalf, I still find that I don't get as much done as I would like to. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations of myself. Maybe I am trying to make up for the time wasted in the past. I'm still working on that. High expectations of the self that are unachievable are the fastest way to disappointment. Fact.
So this is my mindset for this week. Being brutally honest about what I expect of myself. "Working hard" does not count. I swear I get as much done by working creatively as I do by working hard. One of the keys in this area is that old nugget of Covey wisdom - the circle of influence. It's basically a circle within a circle. The stuff in the internal circle is the stuff I can do something about and the space outside of that circle, is stuff that I can't do anything about and therefore is no concern of mine until it comes inside of the little circle. If you're observant and proactive instead of reactive, the stuff outside never comes in without your permission.
Here's a good example: I can write a book, I can do everything I can to sell and promote the book but I actually have no control over whether people choose to buy it or not after that. That's for other people to decide. Once you've got that figured out and stop worrying about it, you immediately gain about 25% of your time back for other stuff. It's really simple. See it coming. Identify it as something that is not your cross to bear and move on. If it is your cross to bear, bring it in to the circle, deal with it and move on again. Eventually, you learn to react with a pro-react stance.
Jeez. That's quite enough of that - but thanks for listening. It's good to say things out loud...