Fingers in Pies

This year I have taken on a lot of responsibilities. Even though I love it, these responsibilities do slice my time up a lot. It is why I will proceed to break down last week, if you are not interested in the details you can simply scroll down and look at the pie charts I made. Here we go!

Most of my time is spent in class. On average that would amount to something like 32 hours per week. Mind you this does not include homework, school projects or study time. On average in a week I will spend about 9 hours studying outside of classes. There are three reasons to study for me – either I did not grasp a concept, I want to cement my knowledge in a given subject or I need to prepare for an oral exam.

Next up is volleyball. I have two trainings of two hours per week and a game on Sundays. The length of the game can range from 2 to 3 hours. Furthermore, I try to do HIIT workouts twice a week. That would add another hour of sports. So let’s say that’s about 8 hours for the whole week.

I shall also take into consideration 5 hours for idle travel time. This is mostly for volleyball but also for going to visit my sister or eventually travelling to Brussels to visit family and friends.

I just checked that last week I spent a mind-boggling 12 hours on Instagram. Cutting myself a little slack, I communicate a lot through Instagram, but still 12 hours... Damn... Also last week I spent 7 hours on Youtube but this I find more acceptable since I tend to consume informative and educational content there.

I would argue that a rather big percentage of the leftover time is spent on social interactions and hobbies. This being said I have not documented that time so I can not say that as a fact. Anyway, based on this week's stats I decided to play around with excel and make pie charts.

I am not going to lie, the 11% of my awake time being on Instagram scares me. I think it is a rather solid call-to-action to myself to limit my time on social networks. I am not sure yet how I am going to address this issue but it will from now be on my to-do list.

As mentioned before, my free time is shared between social interactions and hobbies. My hobbies are this blog and DJ'ing. 39 hours of free time (the equivalent of that 35%) for social interactions and hobbies seems pretty reasonable, but I must say that in real life it does not feel like such a long time. This is Parkinson's Law, work fills the time allotted to it. As I said last week, sometimes the going gets a little tough. This means that sometimes the energy left after dealing with 65% of the daily activities is not enough to act on social interactions and hobbies.

The initial point I wanted to make when starting to write this post was that it is not possible to do everything. As much as the perfectionist inside me wants to master everything I do, choices have to be made. I came to this realisation when I was put on the spot DJ'ing at someone's birthday. Of course, I accepted and I was successful in interacting with the crowd and making transitions but I noticed that I was rusty. This felt unsettling since I used to pride myself on having the basics of mixing down to a tee.

The control freak inside of me still sees hope to get more out of my time. The 12 hours of Instagram could be used for DJ'ing and creating more social interactions. I think I will do a little cleanse of that social platform in the following weeks. So let's see in a few weeks if it is possible to keep my fingers in all those pies.

This Week's Suggestions:

I suggest that you meditate on how you spent your time in the past week. Write down approximately where your time goes, this gives a cool overview. This overview can be a catalyst for change.

🎶 My new musical obsession – Lowkey Hard

This type of music can be described by a rather fast pace, it ranges from 150 to 160 beats per minute. Yet there is a melody and it does not have the harshness which is typically associated with this kind of fast pace of a song. One of my favourite songs in that category is "Endless Desire" by DJ Heartstring. It vibrates some sort of happy energy throughout the whole song.

Thanks for reading! Till next week!