I had a little bit of an “oh yeah” moment the other day. No, this did not proceed the consumption of an Oh Henry bars…. I’m sorry, that was a lame joke. This was more of an epiphany moment. This realization can essentially be summed up as follows: to add something, you must first take something away.

Over the past several months I have been trapped in a bit of an addition mode. As I add one thing after another, I’ve found myself scrambling to find the time to fit it all in. Unfortunately for me, and for my sanity, no such ‘time’ actually exists. Getting on average 5-6 hours of sleep a night, I’ve felt slightly manic in my desperate attempts to keep up with my ever-increasing work load.

I just keep coming up with so many cool (at least I think so… keep in mind that this blog is from the perspective of someone who is 2 parts workaholic, 1 part nerd, and 3 parts creative genius [no? well, this is awkward] – this adds up to 6… I don’t know why that’s relevant) ideas for how I can spend my time. There’s so much that I want to accomplish, and I’m way too impatient to wait until I’m done thing A before I start work on thing B. If you’ve stopped by my weekly planner lately, you’ve probably observed a number of things falling by the way side. If I do manage to get everything done, you can bank on the fact that I’m not getting everything done with quality.

As I start work on an assignment, the 8 other projects that I’m consecutively working on heat  up the desktop that is my brain. If I were a computer, that little fan would be going off non-stop. When I hear the fan turn on in my laptop, that is my cue to maybe shut down my computer for a little bit and give it a break. Funny how I don’t treat my body in this same way. I hear the fan going off, saying it’s time to sleep, and I go to Starbucks and grab a medium dark roast coffee with cinnamon. Is that healthy? I would like it to be (so that I could keep doing it), but I have to acknowledge that it’s not.

This topic came up in conversation with my new boss at myyogaonline. She told me that she had just given her two weeks notice at a yoga studio (where she taught) so that, on her days off, she could focus more of her energy on writing. She said that even though she loved to teach, she was willing to temporarily sacrifice that love in favour of another.  

That’s a pretty powerful idea right there.

I also listened to a podcast recently where the interviewee spoke about the importance of saying ‘no’. I almost never say no. It’s a problem – but finding the ability to say this very important two letter word does a couple of things:

1. It asserts to yourself that your time is valuable, and that you have a right to use it the way you choose.
2. It helps you to clearly differentiate between what you want and what you don’t want – because if you’re someone who says yes to everything (like me) maybe you don’t actually really know what you genuinely enjoy, and what you’ve only convinced yourself that you enjoy in order to make sense of the time and energy that you’re putting behind it.

Making a decision to focus is extremely difficult for me to do, because there’s just so much that I want to do, but success comes with focus. Quality is extremely important, and if you continue (if I continue) doing things only at 60% capacity, well I might as well not do anything at all.

This week I’m going to be sitting down with my schedule, and putting some serious thought into where I would like to focus my energy in the coming weeks. The fringe play I’m rehearsing for is definitely on the top of that list. This blog and my voice (I’ve returned to my voice work this past week) are also near the top.

It’s hard for me to subtract anything, but I’m biting my tongue and pressing the “x” button on some of those background applications with the knowledge  that I can always come back to them when time again permits.

Do you have a problem with over scheduling yourself? Please, share your thoughts on this post in the comments section below.