I’ve written about being over-scheduled in the past, and this is kind of the same idea. But at the same time it’s different and it’s weird. But somehow it feels like my time is disappearing from me. And with that disappearing time, I also feel like I’m not doing as many of the things that make me happy each day when I know there is time to do them.
I seem to be losing my Wednesday and Friday afternoons. Those used to be my workout times, but lately I’ve been working out in the mornings and those afternoons are free. But somehow that time it going by without me realizing it and I’m losing that time. I need to be a bit more intentional with how I schedule my time so that I don’t end up sitting at my computer going down a YouTube or Buzzfeed rabbit hole after work and wasting those hours. I’ve had weekend days like that as well when I get up at 7am and then all of a sudden it’s 7pm and I have no clue how I spent my day.
And part of the disappearing time is realizing now that my routine is a bit different that I don’t have the same time to kill that I did before. When I was driving to the Brentwood Orangetheory location after work twice a week, I had so much time in my car. I spent about 30 minutes in my car driving there and driving home would take between 1-2 hours (I know that sounds crazy, but since I work from home I figured this was my commute). During that time in the car, I would listen to podcasts. I usually would get through at least 1 podcast each time I drove to my workout.
But now that I’m not going to that location when the drive would take that long (going on Mondays is a pretty fast drive), I don’t have that time that I’m listening to my podcasts. And that wouldn’t be a problem for that many people, but since I listen to over 50 podcasts they were starting to pile up! I’m not using those afternoons to listen to podcasts while I’m home, so that time to listen has gone away. So I’ve had to make more of an effort to listen to podcasts since the time that I used to listen to them wasn’t really there anymore. So now I’m trying to spend my time during work between customers listening to the backlog and I’m finally starting to get close to being up to date on them again.
I know that everyone has this problem and seems to lose track of time, but because I’m really trying to be more mindful of so much in my life I want to work on making this not happen as often. There will always been random days every so often where the day will be wasted watching lots of random things on Netflix. But I want those to be rare and not happening as often as they have been recently. The example of losing my afternoons and then also losing podcast listening time shows exactly what is happening. I’m losing that time, but I’m also losing the time that I used to spend doing something that makes me happy.
I love listening to my podcasts and I need to dedicate time to listen to them. In the same sense, I need to make sure I dedicate time to doing other things I enjoy. I do read pretty much every evening before going to bed, but I should make an effort to read more often. Reading before bed is only for a little bit of time because then I fall asleep. But I get so much pleasure out of reading and I should be doing it more throughout the day.
Scheduling fun things doesn’t necessarily sound like the most exciting thing, but I really do need to work on it. I think scheduling it helps me find the balance between being over-scheduled and under-scheduled and helps me plan where I have empty time in my schedule that I might want to fill with something else. While there is always time I want to use to watch TV, I don’t want to spend an entire day just watching junk. I’m working on only watching shows that I have recorded so that I limit how much TV I’m watching and I also can stop mid-way through a show if necessary (I do make an exception to this for news).
I’ve also realized lately that I haven’t been doing as many things from my happiness checklist as I was doing before. I’ve thought about maybe changing some of the things on the list, but all 10 of the things still are things that make me so happy when I do them. And I haven’t thought of something else that makes me just as happy or happier to replace them with. So instead of changing them (which is what I’ve done in the past), I am just trying to be more intentional and trying to make the effort to add them back into my schedule. I probably need to set some reminders on my phone or add them to my calendar so I don’t forget, but having reminders isn’t a bad thing.
Hopefully the combination of realizing I’m losing time to doing nothing and I’m not doing as many things that make me happy as I should that I can start planning better and that will just make me feel happier and not that I’m wasting time in lots of aspects of my life.
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