To keep going in this contemporary Nigeria, one needs to multitask. Different responsibilities keep calling. If you are not a student, you would be an employee. If you are not any of the two, you would most probably be self-employed. In all of these, one's attention is needed in diverse ways.
I have had my share of responsibilities over the years. I think of myself, my family, my work and personal development. My first responsibility is to take care of my family by providing food on the table. I have written about my work previously on this platform. I am a teacher and a farmer. Farming is seasonal for me but teaching is all round the year. In addition to these two, I blog on hive.
When I am not in the season of farming, I concentrate on my teaching work and my activities on hive. Once it is the time for farming, I dedicate a portion of my time to supervising the farming work. At the peak of this season, I could leave home before 8 am and return home almost 12 hours later. When I think of the percentage of my salary going into feeding my family, I encourage myself to grow what we eat as much as possible. This saves cost in no small measure.
No matter how busy I am in an effort to work and pay my bills, I am equally highly concerned about my professional growth. I don't want to be too comfortable with where I am to the extent of not striving to improve. As a result of this, I am mostly running one academic programme or the other in order to add value to myself.
Presently, I am running a Master degree programme. My workplace and the university where I am running the programme are far apart from each other. This added to my retinues of activities. I have to be traveling in-between the two cities weekly or fortnightly. As a research degree, I need to create time to research. The weight of meeting up with all of these responsibilities could threaten my stability atimes.
To maintain my balance, I devised some ways that I handle the pressure that comes with the activities.
The first thing that I protect so much is my physical and mental health. I can sacrifice any other thing for my well-being. It's only when I am fit physically and mentally that I can continue to struggle to meet up with targets. Any target that threatens my health would have to be sacrificed for my well-being. If I plan to do anything like attending to office work at home, reading or writing a post and I feel fatigued or exhausted at the point of starting, I would leave everything quietly and sleep. It's possible for me to wake up after a few hours to complete the task. This has helped me to avoid breaking down.
Another way that I maintain my feet is to deviate from my routine activities once in a while so that I boost my self confidence and morale through unusual activities. The activities could be playing games, dropping my phone at home and interacting with nature through a walk for a few hours.
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It could be any other thing, so far it is outside my routine activities.
Another thing that I do is to plan my time and schedule properly. This helps me avoid doing things at the rush hour.
Above all, I listen to my inner self in all that I do. When my instinct tells me to take a rest, I drop whatever that I am doing to take the deserved rest.
All these have helped me to maintain balance physically, mentally and psychologically.