What with the twists and turns of responsibility that come with adulthood, it can seem that life is constantly pulling you in every other direction than the one that will allow you to embrace your inner child.
It's a bit of a problem.. And we all know how I feel about problems. They're there to be solved!
This one as it turns out, wasn't too difficult to solve. After sitting down and analysing the problem at hand; I determined that there were two main causes for my shortfall in free time.
Procrastination & tradition.
Not a lot of time went into working out that procrastination was a bit of a problem (thankfully, as the irony wouldn't have been lost on me). If I'm sitting around doing nothing, that time has to come from somewhere; and it can't be from the time needed to do the things I actually need to do!
That means it must be coming from my free time, so it's a bad habit that I need to kick. Hard!
Tradition however took me a bit longer to spot, but I'm glad I did. This covers things like always doing my job search on a Saturday, and my food shop on a Friday.. When there's no need!
I do these things at those times because generally speaking it's what I've always done. It's tradition.
Now you may think that moving things about doesn't solve much. It still takes the same amount of time, right? Well, yes, but there are other ways of being more efficient other than just reducing the time taken to do something. For example, I moved my job search to a Monday morning, before I go to work.
On the one hand, I'm losing a couple of hours in bed; but on the other hand I have just completely freed up my Saturday as a result of giving up that time. I call that a win. Not to mention all the other positive effects that come with the breaking of tradition in this instance..
- It's early, so there are less things to distract me. As a result my job search is more focused.
- You can almost guarantee that your job application will be one of the first e-mails they open (by aiming to be the last e-mail they receive before they get to the office).
- Psychologically speaking, experience has taught me that recruiters generally prefer early birds.
So, besides the benefits that come with freeing up my Saturday, it also stands me in better stead for achieving my other on-going goal of securing a "better" job. All just for the sake of saying, "to hell with that tradition".
This is only the start of things to come too. There are still plenty of things that I do, when I do them, just because I always have. Time to have a serious think about how I'm spending my time.. Just not for too long. Procrastination and all. ;0).
Good luck with the new time-balancing regime. :)
ReplyDeleteKeep on 'doing' - the important bit. :)
Cheers. :0).
ReplyDeleteYou're not wrong. It's all too easy to run yourself into a rut of slovenly behavior.
Here's hoping my current short-term goals are enough to break me free of it.. That and my stubbornness and inflexibility when it comes to yielding.
As the old cliche goes, "winners never quit, and quitters never win".