On Not Enough Time and Routine
Writing Challenge Number Ten! Double Digits!
In recent years, I’ve often found myself thinking that there really isn’t enough time in the day to get everything I wanted done. I still think this. Especially now, as I find myself right in the middle of a move and paperwork. To get a task done correctly you have to focus on it, and to focus on it you need time. Each task needs its own chunk, even if multitasking. I have a bad tendency to overstack tasks for a day, and feel deeply unsatisfied when I haven’t been able to either properly focus on, or properly complete them all.
Which I mean, of course I can’t. No matter how focused and driven I am, and no matter my discipline, I have a limited performance capacity, like all humans. I’ve been able to up my capacity and create a routine that allows me to usually maximise what I get out of every day. Or, at the very least, get a bit more out of the days I need. But maintaining that routine becomes the challenge. I feel like these blogs have turned me into a bit of a broken record on routine and the fact that mine’s currently broken, but it is. I guess that’s the main reason that I keep writing about it. The biggest struggle with freelancing has been making a routine, and one of my proudest achievements is slowly building that up over the years. I feel like I can generally switch up my lifestyle quite radically and eventually be able to mould a new routine into it.
But it’s the ‘switching up’ and ‘changing’ part that becomes the issue. Particularly when there’s a lot of it going on. Change is a normal part of life, and I’ve even written an in-depth blog post about adaptation to changes and moulding your routine (which you can check out here!). It’s one thing to write an article about, and it’s another to consistently apply these concepts in real life. The best that you can hope for is that the transition period is quick, or that you can maintain some semblance of a routine throughout it. Like many other things, I have slowly but (hopefully) steadily been improving in this area these past few years.
Recently, I have been focusing a lot on maintaining daily ‘minimums’ and hitting absolute targets every day no matter what happens. I’ve had a few smaller targets that I’ve been hitting every single day for a while now. Among my top ones is a nearly 900-day streak for daily kanji practice (898 as of writing this blog!), and stretching first thing in the morning every day since late 2022. Both of these daily targets are simple and easily achievable no matter what happens. Excepting an extreme emergency, it is extremely unlikely that I’ll stop either of these habits any time soon. And it’s become easier to stack small habits once you have a base of a few. You need a foot in the door, and then you can slowly start building things up.
Once you’ve convinced yourself and your brain that you’re able to tack on a new, more positive habit, it becomes significantly easier to do the same a few more times. I suppose I’m just frustrated that it takes time to do this. All things do. Turmoil and change will always bring about instability, but that just means that you get to enjoy building up a new routine and reestablishing habits. Restarting that counter from zero is sometimes extraordinarily satisfying, despite the occasional frustration. Plus, more than anything, it’s good to have incremental goals to get to on a daily basis. I do look forward to those first nights in my new apartment after all of the moving has been completed though. That will be a wonderful break from a lot of the administrative and general pains that I’ve been going through. I have a new, profound respect for anyone that moves on an even semi-regular basis.
To summarise, routine’s great and I’m just grumpy that mine’s broken at the moment. I’m trying my best to maintain a semblance of normalcy through this tumult and hopefully hit the ground running as I get back into the rhythm of things. There still really isn’t enough time in a single day to do everything that I want to and everything that I need to, but there’s nothing else to do but get it over with and do one’s best. I very much look forward to my first workout in two weeks tomorrow.
Writing this out and posting it is surprisingly therapeutic. Not necessarily the ‘posting’ part, per se. That’s also partially for accountability. Formulating my thoughts and putting together at least semi-coherent strings of narrative throughout these blog posts makes me reflect on its contents. This particular habit, as I hope it will shortly become, has slotted into my nightly routine. It feels like a form of meditation, getting a flow of thoughts out and sorting things out. I also often feel that the worries I was experiencing have had a satisfying conclusion to them, as I write and have a sort of dialogue with myself. Maybe, hopefully, some of you might glean something from these miscellaneous streams of consciousness as well.
