Time is on my side, yes it is!

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Ok, so last weekend I started unsubscribing from blogs, newsletters, Facebook page notifications…I thought it’d take me a couple hours on Sunday and I’d be done.

Well, not so fast chappy! I unsubscribed to a lot of things on Sunday – I had both Saturday’s and Sunday’s emails to deal with, and the 3 main emails I still use - but what I didn’t expect, was that I would still be going right up to this morning!!!!

So, guess how many I am up to at time of posting… no, I’m not going to tell you in the post, have a guess. One guess each and whoever comes closest first will get one of the few remaining 2016 Nature Calendars I have in stock and if you have one already, well, they make great gifts J

What shocked me is the realization of how much time I allowed to be eaten away each and every day in the task of keeping my inboxes clear. And how much negative energy I was adding to my day if I allowed all that undealt-with clutter to stay in my subconscious.

Let’s do a little math:

10 minutes first thing in the morning while you look at the titles and select those you know you won’t read and delete them.

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15 minutes while you half-read some of those you ‘want to’ / ‘should’ read

20 minutes every 3 days when one catches your attention and you dwivay (divert aimlessly) down a path that may or may not significantly improve your life.

In a week, that’s 70 + 105 + 60(ish) 

= 235 minutes or nearly 4 hours of life.

4 hours…that rings a bell…Tim Ferris and his famous ‘4 Hour Work Week’ book (which I am yet to read, I got the gist of it from various blogs, but maybe I should take a read…). Now, tell me, if the theory is that in 4 hrs a week it is possible to do enough targeted work to earn you a comfortable living, then why, oh why do so many of us let such a significant chunk of our lives fritter away?

Think what you could fill it in with:

“Oh! I wish I had time for the gym! L”

“Oh I wish I had time to learn to sail”

“Oh, where will I find the time to visit some of the exiting spots in my island/village/town/country…”

“One day I will find time to paint, read, swim, learn Spanish, go to my kids’ shows, clean my store-room, write my novel, adjust those clothes, learn golf…………………”

So, I have resolved to stop asking people carte blanche, to subscribe to my blog – by all means do if you feel it is going to be a worthy read that will help you move forward on your journey – I have kept a small selection of subscriptions for this purpose, but otherwise, do the more important things! 

I’ve chosen to invest some time in figuring what my own special priorities really, truly are and to concentrate on putting things in place, bit by little-step bit, to make those happen. As I talked about last Sunday, I have signed up with a coach, Debra Ross, "Life by Choice"  and we are setting do-able weekly to-do lists. This is allowing me to have ‘experiences of success’ and yes, it does feel pretty darn good! I realize I am still not fully comfy with my goal levels and progress, but I realize also that that is a part of the process, so I am not beating myself up over it J

In this process of figuring my priorities, I realized there was an unexpected blessing in the challenges of my 5-day a week job that has been a real tax on my energy – physical and mental: I stopped being able to do my art/craft/other pursuits because I couldn’t muster the energy to do things, and this unexpectedly, opened up a space for me to see my priorities in a very different light.

Ok, I’ve been on this journey of self-rediscovery for quite a few years now and I’m sure that helped, but what happened was I found that as I lounged or went to bed early tired, but could not sleep, my mind wandered all over the place, thinking, wanting, yearning, being pissed, annoyed, occasionally depressed, over all that I was losing, what I felt I couldn’t do anymore.  

What this process allowed was that I gradually, (over a couple of years, but I’m sure it can be done fasterJ), figured out what I really wanted to do: I no longer ‘had’ to do these things to survive – I have a decent salary, that part is definitely a blessing of the day-job, so now it became purely a ‘what do I REALLY want to do’ and that question applied whether I went the path of keeping the day-job or moving forward to a new version of being self-employed.  So when Debra came along with her coaching – it fitted very nicely in to what I was almost unconsciously already doing myself. Now, with the coaching, it has much more definite focus.

Also, per a convo I had today: Don’t buy into that crap that you have to be all positive feeling and big goals all the time – positive affirmations are good, but ONLY if you are really ready to buy into the positivity, otherwise, if the bar it set too high, they can just seem like one more unattainable goal and big reason to beat up on yourself for ‘not being good enough’. Allow yourself to be occasionally sad, mad, depressed about something, recognize the feeling, respect that it exists and see if you can let yourself find some learning from it. Maybe permission to accept you don’t like something, maybe realization that you are asking too much of yourself or trying too hard to be what someone else says you should be…take it one teeny step at a time if you need to and know that sometimes, being still for a while neither moving forward or backward, just ‘being’ is just fine too.

So, Sunday morning finds me still a little un-used to the dearth of emails to deal with in my inboxes. It does give me a good feeling, but I am yet to really effectively reorganize my day to make best use of the time I now have. I can say I HIGHLY recommend doing this though. It is very cathartic and I know in the big picture it is worth a huge amount: I will put this new time I have to good use! 

Me n Suzie on top Pigeon Point - time well spent!

Time is so precious and modern life has so many ways of helping us waste it. Take what is yours back and do just one little thing you really want to do instead.

Don’t forget to put in your guess for the number of unsubscribes I have done! And if you do the same yourself, please do share your feelings on what it did/didn’t do for you J

PS I am not being paid to talk about Debra's coaching - I just genuinely feel this journey is a good story to share with you all and the coaching is part of it, so don't be put off by thinking I'm going the 'paid promo-blog route' I'm not, I am promoting her, but only because I think it's proving to be a very useful part of my journey.