It’s exhausting to be constantly “on”. In extreme cases, I can think of comedians who privately battle depression, but while in public maintain their irreverent persona to the joy of others.
It can be similar in business affairs, in keeping up with the Jones’s, or even in maintaining a functioning household. If there’s no time for full relaxation or decompression, then you’re just “on”, and eventually you’ll burn out.
In my calendar, I try to segment by color what it is I’m doing. Work. Gigs. Side jobs. Health and exercise. I’ve got a calendar header titled Expansion, and it tends to be my most exciting one.
Anything that grows who I am falls under this header. It can be as simple as reading time, or as extensive as travel or getting my SCUBA certification. When the other calendar entries look too heavy, I make time for Expansion. Because if we’re not growing, we’re just dying.
Here some things I was looking at this week:
Life sure is fast.
I started writing this in January. I think it had something to do with cars speeding to places. Why? Because we’re always going. I’ve wrote a lot about time management, staying busy, etc. But what is the answer?
We work too much, to make just enough money to buy what we don’t need, and pay off the debts that we built up spending more than we had yesterday. We plan for more tomorrow, but don’t expect it to be enough because we’re not satisfied with what we have today, hoping that we’ll be satisfied with what we have tomorrow if only we can work hard enough today to make more than we did yesterday.
It’s f*#!ing exhausting. And we are exhausted. Collectively, we are done. You can tell when you look at us. We escape, rather than inhabit. We tune in, turn off – rather than unplug and be. But it’s coming. The change is coming, when we understand it’s not enough just to keep going – but rather that we must find ways of existing that aren’t so damn fast.
I am behind. I know, it happens. But it seems that this week, and last, has kept me more busy than I’ve been in several months.
Trying to create time to write, to read, to produce other work, and to sell, has been a juggling act like little I’ve had to do before. So how do I do it?
Writing I am just eking out, one post at a time. Reading, less so. A stack of books is piled by my bed, and other stacks on and around the bookshelf. Other work? Well, that’s another story.
I guess the silver lining is I’m selling well, and should be making enough pay to finance my trip to Alaska next week. Hard to believe it’s less than seven days away. I’m looking forward to writing from there.
Last week was a hard one. It never seemed to coalesce into something resembling free time. It was two days of training, followed by three 11-hour workdays. After a weekend that was filled with more work, volunteering, and an awards banquet, I didn’t have a chance to work on much actual work – the creative stuff.
I’m looking at my spreadsheet, and realizing that I need to be better. But, we all have that week sometimes, when nothing seems to go the way it’s planned. So pick it up, brush it off, and start over. Now is better than later.
I’m watching the days on the calendar just push ahead, much more quickly than I would have liked. Already we’re nearly into June, which will have me off on an Alaskan adventure, followed by more work for the foreseeable future.
I believe that we oftentimes focus so heavily on the day-to-day that we neglect the future. I have a sticky note (lost in repeated shuffles, so it’s time for a new one) which reads, “Will this get me closer to my mountain?”
The concept came from Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art speech, and it’s a sort of guiding light in my harried, busy lifestyle.
No matter what you do, who you are, or how carefully you arrange your days, there will be people who will want your time. Emails, phone calls, text messages, to-do lists, etc.
Spouses do them, and kids, and parents. Bosses an coworkers. Companies you purchase from, and companies looking to sell you something. Reclaiming your time is paramount to living a fulfilled life. Because if your time is always going towards other people’s goals – towards their happiness – you’ve no time left to work towards your own.
I’ve been working out a 168-hour timeline for the week, planning out days. Without overlap, it looks something like:
Now, I rarely sleep 8 hours per night. I haven’t been as faithful in my yoga practice as I should be. And I do write sometimes during gigs when I’m not singing. So there is overlap.
The problems come when other things creep in and I have to decide which items to omit from the daily list. And things will crop up. Date night (which should be every week). The film that I just have to say (a lot coming out this summer). And other activities that require some measure of concentration on my part – I’m thinking of the garage that needs an overhaul right now.
And I look at Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule in awe, and can’t help but wonder how he managed it. (Of course he didn’t, but it didn’t stop him from trying.)
Some of the things that caught my interest this week.
If you’re thinking about how you’ll make it to retirement, here are six suggestions from NBC’s Kelsey Butler in January of last year. I’ve been thinking about retirement accounts a lot over the past couple of months, having blown through three of them over ten years.
The Tim Ferriss podcast with my hands-down favorite author Neil Gaiman. I first read Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek last spring (listened to the audiobook, twice in a row on several trips across Florida). Gaiman’s Neverwhere I read as a high-schooler, and that was my first introduction to the author. I’ve since read just about everything he’s written, including the Sandman series (straight through and then with the annotated editions from Leslie Klinger), American Gods, Stardust, and The Graveyard Book, to name a few.
If you have an Aubible subscription, get Sam Shepard’s True West, the West End production featuring Kit Harrington (Game of Thrones‘ Jon Snow) & Johnny Flynn. It’s a free download for subscribers (up to two Audible originals each month), and it’s really good.
Unroll.me. I was slow to get this one, but it really works! I’ve gone from a couple hundred emails a day down to less than 30. I’ve still got some clearing out to do, especially across multiple email addresses. but thus far, this has been an amazing help. Plus, its single daily email with previews of each email you’ve rolled (not unsubscribed but not individually let in) gives me one place to see if there’s anything there that I need.
Michael's Musings 