“There is more than enough time in the day to accomplish everything that I want to accomplish.”

This is how I ended my last post, and for the last two days I have been living my day with this motto in mind. Allow me first to elaborate. A large portion of my anxiety stems from an incorrect belief that in order to reach my goals for that day and feel fulfilled, I need to be doing work all the time. My work ethic has currently grown out of a belief that quality is exactly proportionate to the amount of time spent on a given task. I have come to realize that this belief, or this paradigm (the lens through which I see the world), is completely false. Quality doesn’t equal quantity. This is especially true in cases, and I do this a lot, where I’ll set aside a set amount of time to complete a task and spend a quarter of said time procrastinating because I feel as though I either have too much to do in too little time (in which case I won’t meet my deadline anyway), or I have too little to do in too much time (in which case I have time to spare). Even right now, I just caught my subconscious self giving myself until 11:30pm to finish this post (or another 1/2 hour). What I’ve discovered over the past 2 days, as I’ve struggled to defeat this ingrained unproductive habit, is that a task will take as long as it needs to take. Organizing my day hour by hour doesn’t make me more productive, in fact I feel like it drains something crucial out of my waking experience. Planning my day hour by hour eliminates the possibility for something spontaneous to happen, and in a way it also eliminates the possibility that I could be super efficient and get more done than I had planned.

Another bad habit I’ve gotten into is planning my day in 15 minute intervals. If I complete a task, and look at my clock and it’s something like 7:22, I will literally waste the next 8 minutes so that I can start on the next thing, or get up out of my chair at exactly 7:30. Can you imagine how much time I waste waiting for something that doesn’t even really exist. Why can’t I just do things when I have the impulse to do them? Why can’t all of us just do things when we have the impulse to do things? What is the point of waiting?

There is more than enough time in the day to accomplish everything you want to accomplish. So let’s lose the reactive language of “I can’t” or “I don’t know how” and “I just don’t have time.” There are 168 hours in a week. I guarantee that you can find time to do whatever you want to do. I didn’t think that I was going to have time to write this post before I went to bed, but I started at 10:50 and haven’t procrastinated at all as I’ve shared my thoughts with you. So get up when you feel awake, follow your impulses, and follow your heart. Rid yourself of the power of that ticking second hand. Time does not control us. We control time. With that closing remark it is 12:25, and so I finished this post 5 minutes early.