A recurring feeling I get is wow, where did all the time go? And I know I’m certainly not alone with that feeling.
It seems that, even though, if I look at my activities of the day, I’m not doing anything that is directly time-wasting.
I seem to be using all my time towards a good end, which is more than I could say for most of my life.
Having been able to overcome most of my escapism, I devote most of my time to what I consider to be useful work towards achieving a good life.
And yet, when I get to the end of the day, I often think, wow, what did I do in that day? It often seems like it takes so much to add up to anything, and there’s only so much we can do in a day, and it just often feels very inefficient.
The time just disappears.
So sometimes this really bothers me, and I wish I could be more efficient with my work.
Now, there’s a lot of things that I can do to improve the efficiency of my work and get more done.
The most basic is to reduce the things that I’m trying to do.
Simplify.
Have a very clear and simple objective and focus on that, rather than multiple objectives or unclear objectives that will scatter my energy and time.
So that’s a big piece of it.
And connected with that, another piece would be to have big chunks of work, to focus for long periods of time and do a run, do a sprint, get a bunch done, rather than bouncing around between activities.
So there’s a lot that can be done with that, and there’s a lot of considerations about that, and I could talk on and on about that.
But still, it seems to me there’s another thing going on that I haven’t thought about before, and that’s this idea of efficiency depends on having a system.
You have a system where things are done in a regular and consistent way, and then you work on improving the system so that you can do things as efficiently as possible.
But when you’re doing something new, when you’re exploring new territory, that cannot be efficient in the same way, because it’s exploration, it’s unknown.
When you’re in unknown territory, you cannot manage it like a system where you know what to expect.
So I can see it would be easy to let this be an excuse for wasting time inefficiently.
But there seems like there has to be a place for open, wandering exploration.
To take a break from this idea about efficiency all the time, always trying to increase efficiency.
That is useful with existing repeated tasks that are regular tasks.
You don’t want to waste too much time and energy in them.
You want to get them done in a clear, efficient way.
But when it comes to exploring new territory, then we can’t do that.
And that should be a part of life.
Life should never feel like an entirely known system.
You know, I love things to be orderly and organized, and it can be very effective.
But it’s also possible to take that way too far and sort of see everything as this organized, known system.
I find it useful to remember that, as much as I can look around and everything is familiar, even if I seem to be doing familiar things, every day really is a new world, and we are in new territory every day.
And as we develop our new way of doing things, we’re exploring unknown territory.
So, by all means, find ways to close the leaks on time-wasting, but at the same time, I like the idea of having this kind of openness, where I can accept that I’m in an unknown place, and exploring it is going to take some time.
So I don’t need to measure every day by how much I got done according to an existing metric, but maybe I can look at it in terms of what I explored.
Can’t even measure how much, because it’s not clear how to measure how much I’ve explored, but what new has been learned today.
And maybe that means more “What more have I become today?” Maybe that means more than “What have I done?”