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You cannot have productivity or time management without priorities
Tinjaw | Oct 26 2005
My problem is that I have too much Stuff TM that I want to do. I have tons of hobbies and I love to learn, be it by reading, watching documentaries, whatever. I also like to participate with various communities I am a part of. What I am coming to realize is that the main reason why I am not productive and cannot manage my time well is that I am scattered all over the place. And it's not like at work where I can go to my boss and say that I have time for four project out of these ten so choose six for me to work on. This is my personal life; my so called leisure time. Reading one book means missing one documentary which means not participating in some online game which means not working on one of my four or five hobby coding projects which means not playing one of my 25+ computer games, etc. I spend my entire day always thinking about what I am not doing. And pulling a GTD and brain dumping will not solve my problems as there is absolutely no way I can get 10% done of the stuff I want to get done. The thought of giving up hobbies because I don't have the time for them is one I can't seem to bear. How does one go about choosing Anime over PC strategy games, yoga over tai chi, electronics over philosophy, or Everquest over World of Warcraft!!! Until I make a painful decision give up whole meaty chunks of my life I drive myself crazier trying to time manage it all and I will never be productive; even if in some cases productive means finishing a science fiction novel or a module of Neverwinter Nights. 9 Comments
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 I used to give myself...Submitted by fillanzea on October 26, 2005 - 8:25pm.
I used to give myself grief about being a dilettante. I don't any more. I don't abandon things; I move onto something else for a couple of weeks. I rotate between studying very basic Chinese, intermediate Spanish, and Japanese, depending on what I feel like; I sew sometimes, I write sometimes. If you can do something for eight weeks at a time instead of all the time, you can let it take a back seat in your life without giving it up completely. (This is typically the way I go with computer games. I play one obsessively for a couple weeks, then realize it's just a habit, and...don't touch another one for a while). The other thing I notice is that computer games, MMORPGs especially, are very good at giving you a feeling of accomplishment when all you've been doing is staring at a screen clicking your mouse buttons. And it's fine when you're just playing it for stress relief, but when I was heavily into Diablo I felt like I "should" play it, to advance, to get cool gear, and I had to recognize that...the "should" was for things that actually have real-life consequences. And, even when I'm "should"-ing things that are good for me, it IS my leisure time and I've got the right to say, well, if 10% of this is going to get done, I'm going to follow my whims and do whatever portion of that I feel like. » POSTED IN:
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