Keeping up

It's an interesting feeling to be running right at capacity in one's ability to juggle obligations, conversations, and input.

Time management seems to be a recurring theme in my life, particularly now that I've moved out of the era in which I was constantly bored and now have as many interesting projects as I can handle wanting my time. It's truly nice to be able to name a half-dozen things that I am very interested in doing at any moment, and to know that there's really no reason for me to ever be bored provided that I've exercised a little forethought.

It's also hard, since it's extremely difficult for me to drop anything and I don't stop caring about things I've picked up easily, and yet new opportunities show up and I want to pursue them. It's far too easy to fall into the trap of doing too many things poorly, or letting things drop that I really don't want to drop.

Right now, I literally have no more free time. I think I've pared away every pasttime that I could really drop. I almost never watch TV any more, I have a large collection of DVDs going unwatched, and I have an even larger collection of video games, many of which I've never even started. Reading is not optional, nor is writing, or contact with friends and loved ones, and nearly every free moment outside of that is devoted either to work or to innumerable different private projects. Many of which could easily use twice or more the attention that they're getting (INN, News::Gateway, and newsgroup creation all come to mind).

It's not really a complaint. It sure beats the hell out of the boredom that I went through as a teenager. It is, though, a rather sobering thought, and one that I'm not entirely sure what to do with. It's become quite clear over the past five years that it's also not a challenge that's going to go away, or that has any easy answers. It has an extremely strong emotional component, too; as long as I stay in a particular range of mood, I can handle a lot of input and a lot of obligations and balance them all and still accomplish quite a bit. If I have a mood crash, though, then I have to take days where I do almost nothing, I fall behind, and then I have to deal with guilt and the sensation of being significantly behind.

No conclusions yet, just a lot of pondering. This has been on my mind heavily the past couple of days. I've been doing a better job of avoiding mood crashes for the past while, and maybe I'm learning (slowly) more about the emotional control to let me keep doing that.

Posted: 2005-07-05 23:55 — Why no comments?

I've had this window open for rather a while, expecting to have something significant to say in reply, and I don't seem to have come up with much other than: Yeah, that sounds really very familiar; it's very much like what my life has been like lately, too.

One of the things that I've been realizing is that I need to find ways to actually de-stress; most of the things that I have are more ways to escape the number of things that I feel I need to do for a while, but when I "come back" afterwards I end up at the same stress level (or worse, if there's guilt from being behind as a result) as when I left. Mood crashes are really not a very good way of achieving this.

Posted by Brooks Moses at 2005-08-06 22:52

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04