Time Strategies

As time moves forward in my life, my list of things to do has evolved into a living, pulsating organism. I am a business owner. I am an involved parent of eight. I am a dedicated husband. I am...a procrastinator with a list of tasks to be completed that never goes away, it just has cells that die and shed into task completed dander while new tasks grow. I can't seem to ever find the dopamine release that Lauren Marchese claims comes from completing tasks in her article, The Psychology of Checklists: Why Setting Small Goals Motivates Us to Accomplish Bigger Things. Don't get me wrong, the science is there that small successes can deliver small releases of dopamine. Maybe I suffer from a tolerance? I need the bigger dose. 

In his article, The Myth of "Too Busy," Tim Grahl makes the point that people manage to waste a lot of time doing unproductive things. Grahl states that we should prioritize our time to fit what we need to do and to carve out all the superfluous junk that we tend to consume ourselves with. This is the idea that I try to live by. It has taken me a long time to effectively discern what is worth doing. I believe that, if we are honest with ourselves, the time that produces the bigger dose of dopamine is the one worth pursuing. We are in charge of our destiny to a large degree and maintaining focus is the key, right? 

Acknowledging the consequences of failure can be the lens that maintains that focus for me. Interestingly enough, the metric by which we are measured by in this course works well for me. I don't believe in all or nothing. Life isn't really full of pass or fail situations. Mostly, a gradient of success exists in our lives and our progress is measured by how much we failed or succeeded in the number of small tasks we have completed that build into a success or failure as a whole. After all, isn't that the core element in every article we where given to read concerning time strategies?

If I can relate to and take away some validation for any time strategy advice, it would be the message from Jory Mackay in his article, The Important Habit of Just Starting. My time strategy is to get started as soon as possible and then to think big enough that bad ideas will find their way out of time by the pressure of things that really need to be done. This process helps me bounce from one endeavor to another while letting my brain work in a way that it is most comfortable. That process can sometimes appear as procrastination, depending on the priority level of the tasks being considered. But, it is what it is and it works for me.