Stop Asking Yourself 'If This Is The Right Thing To Be Doing With Your Time?'
When I was younger the question I never asked myself is “is this the right thing to be doing with my time?” Assessing my schedule and weighing my options was not a thing I ever needed to do. If I had an idea I would immediately jumped at it. Started creating mock-ups, sketches, and discussing it with my close friends. In the past few years it feels like something completely switched. While I approach my 31st birthday, my mind is racing with many things, in hopes to solidify some of the abstraction that been floating around for years. Productivity has been on the forethought, since it affects my everyday life. While in college juggling classes and side projects never felt like a burden. Maybe it was the fact my school schedule was set by my professors at the beginning of the year and all I had to do was ride their prescribed roller coaster or maybe the fact when I hit a deadline it meant I was completely done with a project forever. It was not like my professor was going to return back the following year and ask me to redo my project. In tandem with struggling to keep up with my personal goals, I learned to be ‘productive’ in my professional life. At work I am constantly confronted that question. I have to quickly asset my full list of commitments and make concessions with my time and energy in hopes to divert scheduling conflicts that will detrimentally affect my whole set schedule and cascade into the future. It no wonder when I get home I attack my goals with the same mentally. Pool all my wants and needs into a bucket and continue to ask that insidious question ‘what should I do with my time,’ read a book, study for my licensing exam, write in my journal, meet-up with friends, catchup with work on my off hours, or possibly balance my financial budget? Cognitively that was one of the worst questions I have asked myself. It is getting impossible to sort through everything that is throw at us on a regular basis without adding the lists of micro-tasks found via our Facebook feeds, email inbox, bucket lists, and friend/family commitments. It almost meditative when you let go of the FOMO and pick up a notebook and sketch without any preconditions. So, this is to me starting my 31st year with trying to stop asking myself that darn question all that time and allowing myself to work on my personal goals without ego or sense of time.