Why do I seem to think I can squeeze ever more activities into my day without giving something up?
- I've been trying to get back into running regularly for weeks now—I need to get into the best running shape of my life for Goofy's Race and a Half Challenge 2010, so I want to build up my endurance starting ASAP, even though the event is still over ten months away.
- I decided a few weeks ago that none of the existing clients for Twitter on Linux meet my needs (advanced filtering while supporting multiple simultaneous users), so I started writing my own in Python.
- I'm working on research for a presentation I plan to give at a simulation conference in Las Vegas in April. The subject matter is not simple, and it's going to take me a good bit of time to make a decent set of slides.
- I told a friend today I'd be willing to help with some grant writing "on the side."
Those items represent new claims on my time that I've been trying to address recently or will have to address in the near future. Now, what makes me think I can just add these new
rocks to my jar—without taking some others out?
Yet, what could I take out? Full-time job? Nope, don't want to eat Ramen noodles. Family? Unh-unh,
come with me if you want to live. Sleep? Usually the default candidate, but always ends up pwning me in the end. So...this is why I don't crank out at least 1,667 words of novelage per diem these days.
What to do: reduce and simplify. Remove things I don't really have to do. Refrain from committing time to anyone without a specific goal and mechanism for creating that time (i.e., identification of what I can eliminate or postpone in order to fit that "rock" into my schedule).
New rock: 2 hours per day minimum to be spent on writing. It's not really "new," actually; I've been meaning to commit to this one for awhile. But now it's going to be the fourth biggest rock (behind the three listed just above). And I'll have to pulverize everything else and just make it fit.
I need a bigger jar. Hmmm...surely through some advanced quantum mechanics research...