How time blocking can save you from yourself

For people who want to do everything, but don’t have the time

I’ve always been pretty ambitious. Not in a competitive sort of way; I don’t want to be better than other people, I just want to be better. I want to learn new things. More than anything, I want to create. Creativity gives me that spark of vitality that feeds back into my natural ambition.

Photo by Bethany Legg on Unsplash

I like to think I’m a fairly organized person, as well, but sometimes this ambition gets away from me. New interests grab hold, and they don’t always let go. I’ll keep starting projects, putting all my heart and soul into learning a new skill, and then the next week something else will catch my eye.

Can you relate?

To combat these tendencies, and to keep the mundane bits of my life intact, I keep a bullet journal. I write down my tasks every day and track long-term goals over weeks, months, even years.

I’ve been doing it long enough that I can see some patterns in how I think and plan. One pattern that keeps arising, despite my efforts to nip it in the bud, is that I want to do everything. That ambitious streak runs deep, and I never know when a new obsessive interest will strike. I’m a software engineer by profession, but I’m also a writer and an artist and a creator of video content. I enjoy knitting, reading, exploring new crafts, and playing video games (Teamfight Tactics is my JAM right now). I’m also a living, breathing person who needs nutritious food and exercise to stay healthy, as inconvenient as that feels when all I want to do is work on my latest project.

There’s so much to do, so when I make my to-do lists I write down… everything.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Okay, not literally everything, but I write down too much. My lists end up being more like a brainstorm of all the things I want to do in my life. Ideas flow freely onto the paper as I write down chores I need to get done, work that is on a deadline, artistic projects I want to explore, and so on. Before I know it, I have fifteen or twenty items that each take over fifteen minutes.