Do you find yourself constantly working on a project, gaining flow and traction in it, but with little time and focus left for the others? You are not alone. Most of us are very good when focusing on one thing for long periods of time.
They are times when we would like to give our undivided attention to one project, and get it off the ground as fast and well as we can (Mission Go get one project deals with this). And sometimes we afford to do this. But they are also times at which we must or want to juggle different projects, and make progress on two or more fronts. Some of these times are obvious because of our work schedule. Some are not obvious, but are easily detected on the inside of our mind.
Time richness is not only about hitting your goals, but also about how you generally feel when inhabiting your time: whether you feel stressed out, or unprepared, or you feel there is enough time for you to get ready for things and launch into them from a place of clarity of mind and energy.
Unfortunately, though many of us enjoy feeling prepared for things, we often sabotage that good feeling by cramming in one extra activity, or staying on an activity for too long, to manage to get more done, before going for that next meeting, activity, or the leisure time for which we would like to feel prepared and in an appropriate mood. Time itself won't ring a bell in our head to tell us we should stop what we are doing and prepare for the next activity. And we won't get extra time to prepare for the next activity just because we wish for it.
Do you have a clear idea about what the things you need and want to do are, or do you find yourself stressed out that you might have forgotten something? Do you know how long the things you are currently taking on will take? Do you have an overview of what’s stuck and what’s working? Do you have a big picture of what your current obligations and commitments are, including the ones to yourself?
Sometimes routine envelops us and we find ourselves without hope that things will ever get better. Compared to the things we told ourselves we will do, our life, though something to be quite content with in many ways, might seem like is falling short. How are we supposed to feel that we will ever get to the part when our dreams start happening, if we are barely able to cope with the tasks we currently have on our plate?
We tell ourselves that we don't have enough time to do all sorts of things that we would love to do.
We sometimes do projects in a hurry and we feel bad about it, because there's not enough time to do them properly.
When we are time-poor, we feel anxious and stressed out. It feels like there is not enough time to truly engage with our activities and the people around us. We sometimes end up believing that having a clear mental state and deploying our best efforts or full self on something are luxuries we don’t afford.
There will be times when you do get impatient, or over-excited about something that you want to make happen.
When you've worked in a balanced way for a while, and you want a big gain to break the routine, or you simply want to make much more progress than normal in a project that is especially dear to you.
When you want to see that project grow, or more, you require it to grow fast, for your own confidence to be restored or strengthened.
Imagine you have two main projects in your calendar, that you should be working on. In fact, any step in those two projects is bound to make you quite content with yourself, to make you feel that you are making progress, that you are safe and on track, and that you will manage to get it done.
Most of us productive and workaholic people (yes, one can be productive without being workaholic), are guilty of this one behaviour, which singlehandedly makes us be tired way more often than we need to be. We don’t know when we have worked enough. Or, more accurately, we establish a bad marker for what it is “enough” done in one day.
One of the obstacles in spending our leisure time in a truly entertaining, relaxed or memorable manner is that by the time we get home, do a few domestic tasks, deal with family and hit the pocket of time that we might still have at the end of the day for our own leisure, we are too tired to even know what to do with it. Those are the times when we are most likely to spend most of your evening zoning out in front of the television, in front of a Facebook wall, or pointlessly searching for something nice to do, at the foggy edge of what's left of our focus.