Always too busy? Read this

Do you ever feel like you don’t have time to do anything? I used to feel that way. I felt like I was so weighed down with work and had no time to do anything else. As per usual I was complaining about "how exhausted I am," to a friend. He asked, “What do you do all day?” I began to complain, “Oh I wake up early to do chores and I make my breakfast and by the time I’m out of the shower I only have 5 minutes till school. In school, it’s just studying and running around for duties and extracurriculars. I rest for an hour when I come home and then I’ve got my classes and homework and duties and all of a sudden it’s 11 and I have to sleep!” 

The devil indeed lies in the details because from that description do you have any idea what I actually do in a day? The dude looked at me and with the fakest tone of ‘sympathy’ in his voice, I’d ever heard said ‘Sounds rough’. It really stung. But he was right, what was I actually doing? Duties? What duties? What level of responsibility do I have in these ‘duties’ that I’m so devoted to them? 

So, I did a Time Audit. I looked at the screen time reports on my phone, laptop, and iPad. Most of my time was spent on Instagram, Netflix and YouTube. The only thing I can justify here is YouTube because I often use it to study. I got over my ‘I’m so busy attitude’ and started listing down what responsibilities I actually had. For example, I have a photography club. What work does that actually entail? (You can do this too)

Every week:

• Assigning duties to photographers for the weekly events

• Make sure they show up and are ready to handle technical difficulties (corrupted SD cards, broken tripods, forgotten cameras, and such)

• Uploading the photos to the digital archive for social media use

Daily:

• Charging the school camera every morning 

• Keeping an inventory of the SD cards

This isn’t much work unless I make it too much work. 80% of the job is just upkeep. The 80-20 rule applies here, 80% of your results are seen due to 20% of your efforts. If I prioritized the basic upkeep work and got it over with every day, it wouldn’t pile up. I'd be in a lot less hot water!

Now this is a very specialized example and there is a chance that your life might be busy because of responsibilities I could never handle, but it never hurts to look over them. The path from realization to change is not easy, but it’s the pathworth taking.