A friend recently asked me how I manage to get the time for all the activities I am involved in. I felt a little strange when I was asked the question; frankly because I have been for a while now, getting disappointed by how much usable time I have let slip by.
To get you upto speed as to what my friend was pointing out, let me walk you thru a typical weekday. I wake up around 6am, hoping to go for a run. If things fall in place(they do about 50% of the time) I go for a run around the neighborhood which depending on my mood and weather is around 15-30min long.
Next important event is the carpool at 7:30am. My office is 45kms away from home and that takes about 45min to cover; Fortunately the office is out of the city and that almost always guarantees great weather and fresh air. My work day isnt a fixed schedule but for the last few weeks I have had to more often than not leave office by around 5pm.
The return journey takes longer about 1 hour 15 min on average. Here is where the second half of my day starts; If I have any theater work to do I have to travel for another 45min – 1hr to get to the class. That is 15kms right thru the city. On an average I spend about 2 hours there working on my plays or helping out with other plays. Very often after the evening I go out for a cup of coffee with my friends and then head back home for dinner. On an average it turns out I travel about 120Kms every weekday for a duration of about 3.5 hrs.
I work most Saturdays and every Sunday I have a violin lesson at noon. I try to squeeze in 30-45min of violin practice at home whenever I can… Its a pity that this has been missing in my schedule for almost two weeks now :(
Besides that I try to steal time to play with my niece whenever I can and for my favorite pastime movies :)
I know a lot of people whose days are twice as hard as mine and they go thru them unflinchingly. Whats amazing is that they not only find time for themselves but also for others; something which I havent got around to getting a hang of. Its people like these that give every aspect of their life time and importance that inspire me to keep pushing.
What I have realized over a period of time is that when you find the right balance with your daily tasks, you will find that giving too much time for a task is almost as harmful as giving it too little time. Its a hard concept to wrap around, we are all trained to believe that the more time we spend doing something we get better at it; The truth is actually that the more you learn in a limited period of time the better you get at everything.
So when my friend asked me how I find time for the things I do, all I could think of was that When you really care for something you will find time for it in one way or another. If you keep waiting for the right time to come, you will be waiting forever.