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.