I used to have a tendency to live life a million miles a minute. If there was a blank spot in my calendar, where I wasn’t physically meeting someone, I would fill it up with something else. I didn’t account for driving to/from places, and I didn’t account for being tired from going to an event or driving somewhere farther away. So I would pile in many things into my schedule for a single day, and when that day came, as I was rushing from place to place, I would get so tired and wonder why I agreed to all of those things in the first place.
For awhile now, I’ve been working on slowing down my life. Although my mind is very curious and wants to try and experience all these great things, it’s hard for my body to keep up. I realize that scheduling so many things into my calendar wasn’t giving me time to rest or even sit down and breathe. And I needed that alone time to process what just happened or to think about what I wanted to do next.
Having such a full schedule also robs us of the chance for spontaneity in life. On one hand, having a full day of plans already booked is great and time-efficient, but on the other hand, there’s something wonderfully glorious about a blank day with nothing on the calendar. I love those types of days because they are full of possibilities and full of surprises and joy.
I’m not saying that we should just slow down to a sloth’s pace and be couch potatoes for life. I just believe that slowing down to rest helps us get back out there and do our work at a much faster pace. By recharging (before we burn out), we can re-energize and be productive, and then go back to resting – like a sinusoidal curve.
When we slow down, we become more intentional with our time. We may realize that certain things cause us stress or anxiety, so we can adjust or remove those things from our schedule. Then we can have more energy for things that we want to focus on – for that particular time in our life. And the things we want to focus on will also change over time like a sinusoidal curve. There are seasons of life where we focus more heavily on career, then we focus more on health, then family/friends, then back to career, etc..
So in a world where “being busy” can sometimes be a status symbol, I am rejecting that notion. To me, not being busy is a luxury. We don’t need to fill up all our time with activities. We don’t have to be 100% productive all the time. We don’t have to do everything we’ve ever wanted to try in this immediate moment. Instead of cramming 10 things into 1 day, we could aim to do 3 things slowly and but enjoy them in the process.
What speed are you operating at these days?
It is a mistake to think that moving fast is the same as actually going somewhere.”
Steve Goodier
Related articles:
A Time for Everything
Measuring Our Success
Less is More
Great advice! I can relate my present work with the above guidelines very well & that’s is the reason I choose to read my mentor work very carefully. I would like to thank ma’am for this guiding articles and motivation to do my best in my career. I have one query -How to deal with multiple activities at one go as submitting projects, editing your resume for job roles etc?
Thanks Ankush! Great question – yes it’s a challenge to balance multiple things at once! A couple strategies are: 1) Write out everything you need to do so it gets it out of your head and onto paper. Then you don’t need to worry about remembering to do all those things. 2) Block out chunks of time to do each task, then for a certain chunk of time (2 hrs) you are allowed to focus only on that one item and not worry about anything else. 3) Decide which of those activities are more urgent than others, and which ones can hold off for a little while longer. Since we all wish we could do many things at once, it’s also important to be realistic about what you can do, so you don’t get disappointed if you can’t do all of it. Give yourself a break sometimes! Good luck!!!