Embrace your constraints

In the last few days I felt trapped by my own constraints. It's not the first time this happened. Publishing a new post each day is challenging. Last week I wrote some posts about ideas I had written about multiple times in my daily blog already. It still took up most of my creative time. It felt like I didn't make any progress with writing, and that my writing practice nonetheless blocked everything else I wanted to work on. To break free of this feeling, I tried something else. I wrote a single scene that might be the basis for a novel. Writing it was fun. But it took me almost twice as long as most other posts. It reminded me of two things. It's easy to break out of creative stagnation, simply by starting a random experiment. It also made me conscious of how little time I have.

Recently, I was called a responsible adult. This confused me. I don't feel like I'm an adult, much less responsible. I still feel like I felt when I was a student. Being a student is a socially accepted way of being unemployed. I just used the time I had having fun and learning about a topic I liked. It didn't feel like I had much responsibility. When I started working as a working student, I noticed that having a proper job is much more fun than I thought possible. Working on real projects means you are learning things that are actually applicable in real life. Suddenly, my time at university was over, and I needed to pay my own bills. So I started to work full-time. In principle, I'm still doing the same thing I did at university. Only now, I have much less time I can spend freely.

I never understood bargain hunters. I remember a conversation in which someone told me proudly how he bought a six-week supply of sliced cheese on offer and how he saved five euros doing so. I never had this mindset. In my mind, five euros make absolutely no difference. I couldn't believe the amount of mental energy for such a small saving. Then again, I never had to think about money in my entire life. While we weren't rich when growing up, money never seemed to be a problem. Right now, I'm living with less than half of what I'm earning. But not everybody is as lucky as I am. And I'm sure there are situations where this kind of planning makes sense. And if not, it may just be a nice hobby. But for me, money isn't the constraint. It's time. So what if I start applying the same principle that bargain hunters use for spending money and start to optimise how I spend my time? This is what I started doing yesterday.

I'm already using timeboxing for my work. Every morning, I sit down for a few minutes and think about how I want to spend my time this day. I'm allowing myself to break with my plan, for example, if I'm currently in the flow of working on a specific task. But I always know what I want to do this very moment. It's one of the best way to reduce procrastination. Yesterday, I created a template for how I want to spend each of my days. Each day, I want to publish a post, learn something new and work on one thing that makes everything else easier in the future. I organised my template around exactly this.

Complaining about how little time I have doesn't help. It's nothing but an excuse. Everybody has some constraints he has to work around. The key is to embrace them, to use them to your advantage. If you've just lost your limbs you can complain that you can't walk anymore. You can indulge in self-pity. Or you can start to train for the Paralympics. It's up to you.