‘Okay what do I have to do today? I should send some emails, finish that excel spreadsheet, call a few clients, make a Facebook post, find some images that look like clouds, and remember to message my girlfriend to make sure we’re still on for dinner at our friends house tonight.
Maybe I’ll start with that Facebook post.
Oh hey! Looks like Shelby had her baby. I should probably comment on that or she’ll think I’m a dick. Might as well check what other notifications I have while I’m on here. Crap, Kevin wants me to contact the whole project team about the upcoming event changes. Why can’t he do that himself? That selfish little assh…you know what, fine I’ll just do it.
Okay, gotta get some stuff done. Let’s work on those emails. Man I got a lot of unread emails I’ve gotta get to. Annd shit one if from my boss that I totally missed! Okay, make it look like you’ve been busy and haven’t had time to get to it until right now but you’re totally on top of it…
Man what time is it? 11:45 already?! Well I left the house late and didn’t really get breakfast soo I might as well take an early lunch.’
Sound familiar?
This is literally my life everyday. I start the day with a thousand things I’ve planned to get done, I have the best intentions to do them but for one reason or another I always only end up only getting a fraction of it done. A text buzzes, my email bings, or my phone rings and before I know it I’m 30 minutes in the future with nothing more accomplished than a witty comment to someones dog fail video.
To make matters worse there’s a ripple effect I’ve noticed that is caused by this issue.
Because of my easily distracted and unaccomplished day I start to fall behind in my work. This forces me to try and make up the work at other times of my day like in the evenings or on the weekend. Seems simple enough, after all there’s 4-5 hours work that one could be utilized to catch up right? But wait there’s still more distractions waiting for me when I get home. Dinner, social obligations, a significant other that’s been feeling neglected (sorry Britt). And so I can either get my work done at the sacrifice of other obligations or I can blow it off and attempt to enjoy my evening. Unfortunately that still means I end up feeling stressed and guilty for procrastinating my overdue work so either way I lose.
Is this what a full life is supposed to look like? Always stressed, constantly playing catch up on your work and never being present in the moment or focused completely on what you are doing at the expense of the people around you?
Enough is Enough
After 3 months (and 10 previous years) of this lifestyle I decided I had had enough. This mindfulness month needed to be the last straw for my time wasting, stress inducing, unproductive ways. I needed to asses my life, why I was having these problems and decide on hard deadlines to correct these issues.
What’s my problem?
To get to the root of my problem I needed to critically analyze my life and why I was experiencing these problems. This meant doing something that would leave me quite exposed. I was going to have to publicly announce my personal flaws and try to address them head on.
It’s interesting that we so often publicly paint images of ourselves as these perfect people. Facebook (or all social media really) is a prime example of this. Facebook is like a resume for our personal lives, and just like a resume we are inclined to over inflate our attributes and conveniently edit out our flaws. We only show the best version of ourselves to the world as not to be judged for having weaknesses or failures. I think this is really sad as it also creates an unfair representation of ourselves to try and live up to.
Guess what? No one is as awesome as they say they are. Everyone has flaws and weaknesses and if we don’t admit them to ourselves and to others then how can we try and work on improving them.
So here it is, my resume of personal flaws:
- I am not good at organizing my life.
- I try to make the effort but I often get complacent and don’t bother to schedule things. Lately this causes me to fall behind in my blog posts, have wasted unproductive days and miss opportunities to work on important things like building the blog itself.
- Planning is not my forte.
- Much like organization I don’t find/make the time to plan my life in advance. Each of these life challenge takes a lot of planning and rather than doing this before my months start I consistently end up scrambling to plan as I go.
- I have trouble balancing important life responsibilities.
- Work, life, social, community, personal, professional, passions, relationships, I am always sacrificing one to commit to another.
- I am easily distracted by frivolous activities.
- Sometimes I even impress myself how quickly I can get off track. If there’s TV on in the background (even commercials), if I get a notification or even if a shiny object comes into view you’ve basically lost me for 2-10 mins. This is sucking away my productivity and causing my work to build up unnecessarily.
- I let the stress of my unfinished work ruin the positive things in my life.
- Rather than enjoying the good things I have in my life I focus on the things I have yet to finish. I worry I’m not accomplishing enough, or falling behind on posts and it causes me to be negative, frustrated and at times (according to others) frustrating to be around.
- My mind is always in a hundred other places and rarely present in what I’m doing.
- I’m always thinking, or working and often not even on things that matter. This lack of focus distracts me, causes me to become less productive and causes me stress which doesn’t allow me to enjoy the moment.
I need help
This is me in a nut shell, well at least the parts I’m ashamed about anyways. But no more, this month I am going to finally deal with these issues that have been plaguing me for far too long.
My first step is to deal with my mental problems. Stress, balance, being present. These problems are mostly internal so my goal is to explore these issues by diving into the world of meditation and mindfulness. If I can gain the focus, perspective and control I’m missing then maybe I can minimize (or eliminate) these burdens.
My next goal is to remove all my frustrating life distractions. I want to streamline the way I operate so I’m not wasting time on useless activities and instead focusing only on the important things that bring value to my life.
Finally I want to build a plan so my life can automate itself. Last month when I had the meal plan it took SO much stress out of my life. I didn’t need to worry whether I was going to make it to the end of the month on my $250 or not because I already knew! I want to organize my life so I have less chaos and more functional time. I want to automate more so I can stress less and more balance.
This is not going to be an easy task so I’ll ask this of anyone who cares to share. Tell me what you do to streamline your life. What resources do you use? Do you have a schedule or app that has changed your life? Reach out and let me know.
Lastly I would like to encourage anyone else that may be struggling with the same personal issues to take this month to be their month to try and do something about it. Do an experiment, try to make an impact to even one thing that’s been holding you back. If you can make your life even 10% better or have 10% less stress and negativity then why not give it a shot?
