I Need to Approach Time Like I Approach Money: Commit to Way Less Than I Have

I’m (hopefully) on the tail end of about a solid month where I’ve just been overcommitted and really haven’t had much unplanned time available to myself. With trips and other commitments, I’ve just felt like I’m drowning a bit and don’t have time to just breath.

And it occurred to me that I should really be spending and planning my time just like I would with money. If I spend it all ahead of time, I’ll feel like I don’t have any.

Instead, I should only commit a smaller percentage and, then I’ll feel like I have all the time in the world to dedicate to whatever I want.

It’s been established in the past that I tend to value freedom over almost everything else. And one way you can rob yourself of freedom is by over-committing.  Flexibility is freedom, and if all of your time is already planned, you have no flexibility.

This also means that if, for example, things come up in work that require way more time, you’re in trouble. You can’t simply give it a little more time until they calm down. Instead you just sort of suffer all the time.

And that’s basically what has happened. I’ve been over-committed and we’ve had a bunch of projects overlap simultaneously. And I’ve just been insanely stressed out.

I think it’s had a seriously negative impact on my mood and well-being. It’s just one of the contributing factors at the moment, but it’s still been pretty impactful.

If I had more time, I would be fine. But I’ve been too committed.

I actually told a friend yesterday that I couldn’t meet them like we had planned. It was going to require a lot of driving and time, and at that moment I just felt like I couldn’t possibly handle it. I felt like I would explode from the stress.

In the end, I didn’t even fully cancel, I just had the friend come to me instead. And that small change actually relieved a huge amount of stress. It wasn’t even huge: just gaining a little bit of extra time made me feel so much better.

So even a small amount of gained, unplanned time can have a huge impact.

I hope I learn going forward to always leave plenty of time free. I’ll feel much more relaxed and “rich” in my life.

After all, it’s one thing to be rich with money. But it’s considerably harder, in my opinion, to be rich in time. Almost nobody is. I’ve noted here in the past that we tend to just fill our schedules up until there’s no more time, and then we struggle. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what people do with their money, too.

In the end, they actually are somewhat interchangeable, and they should be seen as such.

I want to be rich financially (not necessarily a lot of money, but having the financial freedom to do the things I want and retire when I want), but also rich with time. And right now I’m failing that second metric.

It’s just something I need to be cognizant of and work on going forward. Because I think what I’m experiencing right now is quite bad for me.

Not Drinking has Changed my Self-Image and With it: Self-Confidence

It only just occurred to me recently that my self image has changed somewhat dramatically since I stopped drinking. As documented elsewhere in this blog, I think I sort of saw myself (or imagined that people saw me – which may effectively be the same thing) as sort of a clown, a loose-cannon.

While I spent most days not drinking and, of course, working and generally being responsible and productive, many people only ever saw me at parties or other events where there I would be drinking.

And I guess it formed a core part of how I saw myself, too. Not as someone that’s always responsible and knowledgeable and collected, but as someone that’s reckless an occasionally irresponsible.

But when you take away the drinking… How often am I irresponsible or reckless?

Well… Never, really.

I still like to have fun, let loose, be silly, and occasionally boisterous. But it’s always in good fun, I’m not risking anything (including my mood the following day), and there’s really no chance of hurting anyone. I’m always completely in control and basically always make good choices.

And I’ve realized now that not only am I seeing myself totally differently, it also manifests itself as confidence.

I trust myself and my instincts a lot more, and I stand up for myself more when it comes to it. I certainly don’t want to stop being pleasant and easy-going, but there are times when others are, for example, being unreasonable or lightly manipulative, and I have the confidence now to call them out.

I feel like there’s just kind of an inner-strength there and self-assuredness that didn’t exist before that allows me to approach situations with way more control.

Funny enough, right this moment it just hit me that the other blog post I wanted to write was something along the lines of “historically I’ve always looked to others to how I should behave and what’s acceptable, but that doesn’t serve me anymore”, and I’ll probably still do that. But I’m realizing that it’s… Sort of the same thing.

I think there was a sense in my life, for so long, that there are unwritten rules about the world that others understand better than me. Maybe it started way back when I was homeschooled.

But since then, I’ve approached the world – and especially social situations – with a sort of apprehensive and flexible approach, as if I were an outsider that didn’t understand and just wanted to fit in.

But for the first time, I really don’t feel like that anymore.

In fact, maybe that’s even what brought me to enjoy drinking so much. Maybe it quieted that part of me that felt like I didn’t actually belong. Or, at the very least, like I needed to go along with everyone else told me to do because I didn’t quite grasp what was happening.

But I don’t really have that sense anymore. In fact, at this point I genuinely feel like I understand most social situations better than most. I’ve spent so long carefully paying attention to how people behaved and especially trying to determine how they were feeling at any point that I think I’ve actually developed fairly robust emotional intelligence and now have no trouble navigating just about any complex social dilemma.

All of this is likely connected.

I also don’t want to be closed-minded or unopen to new ideas or understandings of the world or those around me, but I feel like I finally have a confidence in any situation that I didn’t have before.

And that feels good.