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My studio has some awesome quotes dotted around it (Shall I give you a proper tour sometime?) but I've finally added what has become my motto for life - Time is not wasted if you learn from or enjoy it. If you think that sounds like the life affirming waffle your desperate for attention cousin shares to their facebook page, I can see why you'd read it that way. However! This quote's emphasis is on your having to do something, not the universe owing you anything. Enjoying wasted timeWhere I first encountered it, and when I first started using it, both elude me. I think some point after university? I can't find it as a quote in the form I use, so I figure that I heard the quote "Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" at some point, and I added the learn. It's fairly evident what that enjoy part means, but it can be easy to let it trap you. Just before Christmas I found it very difficult to switch off, I felt like I was wasting time by reading . But I took a moment to reflect, and that reading time was something I actively looked forward to. So I properly relaxed and then ripped through all of the Shardlake books. The flipside is being sure you're genuinely enjoying a thing. I'm trying to get better at asking myself "Am I enjoying messing with my phone, or am I just in a lazy mode?". So check in from time to time, and ask yourself if you really do enjoy your 'wasted' time, and then prioritise what does engage and delight you. That learn part is importantThis is not a simple positive quote to say that it's ok, life can be crap, you've got this. This is asking "Hey, that experience you had, did you enjoy it? No? OK, so what can you learn from that?" It asks you for your introspection, analysis, and then hopefully, you don't waste your time in the same way in the future. As a mild example, I had a tedious 50ish minute wait for a GP appointment, which was running 45 minutes late. It was tedious, so I planned ahead and for my next appointment I arrived with a book loaded into my kindle, and a notepad to work on business stuff. Hah! I had learnt! There are deeper personal examples too, which I won't dive into with detail. In those cases asking what I learnt has helped me to come to terms with various relationships which fell apart, or realise why I was treading water in jobs. I can now look out for and hopefully better manage the same situations in the future. Having realised I didn't enjoy something, I've learnt from it instead.
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I'm trying to get better at this. I'm not bad at planning time or making the most of it, but I tend to overwork on Monday then on Tuesday I'm too tired to do much, then I overwork on Wednesday because I feel like I didn't do enough on Tuesday. I think it's something to practise!
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