I have to admit that I suffer from a tendency to notice "shiny objects" out of the corner of my eye... causing me to stop working on whatever is in front of me, and instead explore the "rabbit hole" of the shiny object.
So, starting at the beginning of August, I decided to embark on an unusual experiment.
I decided to create a spreadsheet, actually track and log all my activities every day to see where the hell time goes. Not where I "guess" time goes, but where it actually goes... including, into creating useless charts!
Like most people I often end up at the end of the day and wondering why the I've only gotten a few things done on my To Do List! I figured that the best way to honestly answer that particular riddle would be to directly track what it is I spend my day with.
Yes, I recognize that "particles behave differently when they know they're being watched," so the results I might come up with would only be partially reflective of reality... but there's really no way I can escape from my ADHD-ish tendencies and my bad memory, as well as my tendency to sidetrack into things that look more shiny than whatever I'm working on in that moment.
I'm going to pursue this experiment until the end of the month of August and then have a look at what I can do to improve the way I do things. If anything at all. Could be that I simply have more going on than it would be reasonable to expect a single person to handle, each day.
Because, as many of us might do in this world, I need to address this sense that "I never have enough time" to get things done.
After just ten days a few things are already becoming evident to me.
For starters, I spend far less time on Hive than I thought I did, and in fact I spend far less time with social media, YouTube or sidetracked diversions online than I thought I did.
Go me!
The second thing that is becoming clear is that I spend way more time simply taking care of "life infrastructure" stuff than I imagined.
When I say infrastructure stuff, I'm talking about such things as scooping cat boxes, stopping to water the garden, running to town for groceries, taking packages to the post office, making food, emptying the dehumidifier, emptying the diswasher, sorting the recycling... the whole number of little "things of life" that constantly are coming up.
Right there, I suppose I am actually unearthing a somewhat "hidden benefit" of going to work for an externally based job: all these things aren't constantly in your face reminding me that they need doing, when you're sitting in an office building.
Another thing that is becoming evident — although it is not a great surprise to me — is that having all these home-based micro businesses doesn't exactly lend itself to efficiency. That is to say, I very rarely have an opportunity to sit down and focus on something long enough for me to really "get in the zone" to be effective and productive... because I have to switch to something else that's suddenly screaming for attention.
It reminds me a bit of what one of my managers said, when I was back in the IT industry many years ago... namely that he really wasn't really working any more (he was actually a great coder), he was just flitting around from one point to another putting out fires.
It never really occurred to me that you could end up with the same kind of non-productive self-imposed bureaucracy when working from home. Already evident, I spend far too much time involved in recor keeping and accounting.
Of couse that has to be done, but it's so damn time consuming!
Now — as I said — I'm going to let this experiment run through the end of August. But I have a feeling I will end up needing to sit down and taking a long hard look at whether I even want to continue with some of these projects... and if I do want to continue with them, whether I want to restructure how I approach things so I work exclusively on one project for a week, then stop and work exclusively on another project for a week or something like that.
Of course that's going to be a tricky thing to do because everything I do — in some fashion or another — involves versions of client engagement, inflow of orders and so forth... which must be attended to every single day.
A couple of years back a friend of mine suggested that I really needed to employ a virtual assistant, as well as a "publicist" to handle all the social media updates and marketing.
Well that's a nice idea but I don't actually make enough money to pay them and still havie anything left over so that I can pay for electricity, food, housing, Internet and stuff like that. And with prices constantly going up while business remains more or less stagnant it's an equation that simply couldn't be made to work.
It all leaves me wondering whether I carefully constructed a little "empire" that never actually stood any chance of being self-sustaining and successful...
Self-sabotage takes many forms...
Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your day!
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Created at 2025.08.11 14:28 PST
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