Its been a very interesting month for me with the culmination of many various volunteer groups, committee work, board, council group and Starbucks obligations, leading to a point where I quite literally cannot keep up or seem to get caught up. This has happened to me before in many more instances than I would like, but in all the prior situations I've come to the conclusion that "where there is a will there is way". That will has forced and guided me to become more and more developed in my planning and organizing skills by utilizing technology and systems to accomplish my ambitions and goals of wearing more hats and being more things to more people.
As I get caught up in another moment like that now in my life I've come to the realization that it's all about balance. There are two very specific situations in the last few weeks that have helped guide me to my conclusion of finding balance and happiness.
The first hit me when I was on my 4th hour of emails, fairly stressed but determined, when my friend texts me. Trying to be reactive and kind I respond via text, and as I go back to emailing I end up responding to one of his emails, while we are still texting. Long story short we end up texting, emailing, and instant messaging - 3 separate conversations. It became a joke and he added facebook to the mix. I'm sure it's a gen Y thing to always be so connected and reactive, but the tricky part of it is that I was satiated in my need to keep with my systems, emails get responded to by amount of work time, quick ones first and then filed in the proper mail folder. Texts are their own category with its own system and same with facebook etc. I learned two things.
1. sometimes being too organized and disciplined can actually lead to more inefficiency
2. If your inundated with "To do's" how do you dictate what gets done right now and what gets pushed out? which leads me to my second epiphany.
All week long I'm going through the motions of where my iphone tells me I need to be, color coded by what "hat" I need to be wearing. *After planning something in the macro level I let my iphone tell me where to be and what to do. Every thing I did and every event I attended I questioned myself, is this a better use of my time than that? I've never questioned the planning that I've put in place on my calendar before, but with my "time" resource dwindling and commitments increasing it becomes much more apparent that something has to change. And so I come back to the same conclusion as before "where there is a will there is a way". So I'm going to try a couple of tactics and systems to enlarge my capacity and develop the skills to do more in my day with less time or cut things out.
The interesting thing about this time around is that I'm not stressed out about it anymore. I know where I'm headed and through trial and error, success and ambition I will eventually get to the level that I want to be at. I just need to take a moment to smell the roses and enjoy what I have.
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