We all think ‘I don’t have enough time’ or ‘I don’t have enough hours in the day’ but it’s pretty damn amazing at how much time one does have once they stop doom scrolling.
To prove myself wrong, I plotted every hour of the day and assigned it a job. The work hours were easy to assign, so were the training hours and the gym classes, even easier were the 8.5 hours for sleep each day, and the walking to or from work.
What did I visually see?
A lot of fucking hours of freedom.
Time to write? It was there.
Time to work on Amplify the Noise, this site, another project I have started? It was there.
Time to clean, meditate, journal, read? You guessed, it black and white, a simple spreadsheet showed me how much time I had to do the things I wanted to do and the things I enjoyed doing.
Mondays are the days that are least free. I do my basics – read, journal, meditate.
Tuesdays – Sundays, not only do I do the basics, but I have time to work on my side projects.
I even have time on some days where there is nothing scheduled. If I doom scroll, I doom scroll. If I sit and stare at the ceiling, so be it.
The plotting out of time has been excellent for my mental health. It allows me to not feel gutted I wasted this time doing this when I could have been doing that. Now this and that both have time.
But ya girl is tired.
And it’s not completely my menstrual phases fault either. Though I’m sure it’s not helping.
I’ve been busting my butt on Amplify the Noise (ATN). Listening to music, writing about music, building a base, connections, and so on. Then I hit busy time at work where the last thing I wanted to do was come home and stare at a computer screen even more, so I got behind on listening and writing.
With ATN, I am the researcher, the writer, the editor, the graphic artist, the tech support, the IT, the social media manager, and whatever else pops up. It’s exhausting. At the end of September, I moved from WordPress.com to WordPress.org as I wanted more freedom for ATN. In moving, I also launched a new design of the website, figured no time like the present, let’s just pull the plugs on everything all at once. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it was nerve racking. There were hiccups but I got them sorted with my limited IT knowledge and my friend Google.
Oh, did I mention, I moved this site as well from dot com to dot org too?
My entrepreneurial mind and my creative mind have been in high gear since July and I think my body, mostly my mind is like fuck you both, imma rest.
And that’s okay. ‘Cuz, like I said, earlier, ya girl is tired.
I want hours of doing nothing except laying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. Maybe even a day of just turning into a vegetable on the couch.
But alas, I am here, staring at the screen, writing this, and when I’m done, I’ll go back to working on ATN and my future side project…and plotting out Book 2 of Night of the Hunter that I finally sussed out…and meal prepping…and cleaning…and ignoring the laundry again.
I might be tired, but I keep going nonetheless.
If you haven’t seen Amplify the Noise‘s new look, give it a squizz. The logo is a collaboration piece between Syd Rayne‘s piece Trippy Goth Girl and designer guru Drew Fellows. The layout still needs a bit of tweaking but that is something that can wait, as I have more music to get through than time to hunker down and look at code and design. And that’s not me imagining I don’t have have time. That’s my spreadsheet saying that!