tonyballinger.com

Hanging out in a hospital a lot lately has made me think a lot about my life, and how I’m spending my time. I waste a lot of time on things like watching excessive amounts of Law & Order, on surfing Mac news sites, and on organizing my iTunes Library. If I were to use a program like Quicken to develop charts of how I spend my time, I’m sure I’d be horrified at how I’m spending my life.

At the same time, a good friend of mine has been mentioning that his life
is so productive that he doesn’t have the free time to enjoy it fully. While
that’s probably better than what I’ve been doing, it’s still not the optimal
approach.

So where is the line? How much time should be spent getting ahead and getting things done, and how much time should be spent smelling the roses? I suspect I could cut way back on the Law & Order without much impact on my life. And I think listening to more NPR would make me feel more informed about the world around me than I do now. For a while, I was listening to a lot of archived episodes of This American Life, and as a result I felt as though I understood more about people who I would never meet. I would like to read a lot more than I do now, and not just the web design and user experience books that I read every day on the train.

Not to be a walking cliche, but I think this week has made me reflect a
bit on my life and the changes that need to be made. I think a large part
of my twenties was spend hiding from the bad things that could happen in
life. And for that reason, I think I’ve excluded a lot of things that could
make my life a lot richer. It might be time to start evaluating what I’ve
been missing, and try to start living the kind of life that I would experience
more deeply.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2005 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.