"Time, why you punish me?"

While I've been putting a heavy focus on work lately, I've definitely made an effort to diversify my week by scheduling "free" time around my busy schedule to simply be me. This. Is. Hard.

Work is a twelve hour affair for me, five days a week: I'm up no later than six in the morning, and I'm officially home no later than six in the evening. On top of this, I have to devote time to other areas of my life: girlfriend at least two days a week, for about three hours (minimum) a night, running my own errands at least once a week, dinner with my parents usually twice a week, and organizing my personal life (bills, cleaning, car maintenance, etc.). Fitting all this in during a Monday through Friday week leaves me with scary-small amounts of time free for me to just be me.

This is why my calendar is littered with events for what seems like the mundane: I schedule time every week to write creatively, study programming, and pay my bills. I keep track of my time on a daily basis in minutes: the difference of getting home at 6:00pm or 6:15pm means a lot to me. While an earlier, younger me would have blasted this type of time management, I'm finding that it's the best I can do right now. However, I'm the only person who believes in my schedule - for example, my family is rather unpredictable in how our plans will ever pan out (dinner, usually), so I tend to not always put them on my calendar.

What I'm ultimately looking for is an activity that is uniquely mine - in my own time, done my own way. Me time. This isn't something that I can find whenever I want it. It's something rare nowadays, and something that I've come to value more than anything else in my life right now.

I feel that real change is coming, and coming in many more ways that I have written about on Critically Correct yet.

B3 out.