Hard experience has taught me that there is only room for Four Important Things in your life – I don’t mean people or situations, but rather, personal priorities.
That First Important Thing is always “whatever it is you do to support your household and not go hungry.” It may or may not be something we want to do (it almost never is, in my experience) but it takes up a huge swath of time and energy in exchange for a roof over our heads, so we can’t claim it’s not important. The day!job I have now sucks up much of my day – writing it down, I realized that 11 hours of every weekday are spent at that job or doing things in relation to that job (packing a lunch, the commute, etc.).
Of course some people are lucky enough that their First Important Thing is something that they do because they want to, such as being a full time writer (my goal) or a full-time parent/homemaker or a full-time health care worker for impoverished communities or a full-time college student. Those are solid gold First Important Things.
But whatever the case may be, you’ve got four things. That’s it.
You may not think so or you may wish it were not so, but it is very much so and the harder we deny it, the harder it is to actually focus on the Four Important Things.
The reason for my declaration about Four Important Things is experience: I’ve spent years trying to have five, six, even eight Important Things I want to do. I’ve seen a lot of friends trying to append a fifth thing to their lives without unseating the original four. It’s never worked, for me or for them. It never will.
Sitting down to forge a realistic weekday schedule for myself really clarified that fact for me — namely, that I don’t have time to goof off, much less add something on top of everything else. For me, the Four Important things are: day!job, meditation, writing, and exercise. It’s just that simple.
Other people might have things like: parenthood, social justice activism, exercise, needlework; or day!job, cooking, fandom, and motorcycles; or parenthood, marriage, college, and playing the piano.
We can sometimes shoe-horn other things in there, such as learning a foreign language during our bus commute to work or doing crochet while we watch TV with the family at night. As those examples show, though, those activities usually are pasted over on top of other things we need or want to do. The Four Important Things, however, always stand on their own. When life gets busy and extraneous activities need to be cut, the first things to go are the side-projects, not the Big Four. Occasionally, desperate times (e.g. a newborn arrives, or you become very ill) will even unseat one of the Four Important Things, but that’s rarely for too long.
If we want to change or re-prioritize, the best plan is for one of the four to be phased out. I want to phase out the day!job and write for a living, which will free me up to add a new Important Thing (what will it be? Dancing? Painting? Bicycle riding? A romantic relationship? I don’t know!). Sometimes an Important Thing phases out naturally to make room for something else – a good example would be those times when we drop exercising as a priority because we start a new relationship, or we drop out of fandom because we get pregnant and are hit with “sudden parenthood syndrome”. It happens.
Or you might become chronically ill or injured, which can flat derail any number of other plans and will supplant at least one Important Thing, likely forever. Definitely not an optimal situation, but again, it happens.
Then there is the reverse, where one of the four is eliminated without adding a new Important Thing to the mix. That’s where we get “empty nest syndrome” where parents whose kids have inexplicably turned into self-reliant adults have to come to grips with the fact that as far as personal investment goes, parenthood is no longer one of the Four Important Things on the radar – not to say that the intrinsic importance of being a parent is diminished, just that the time, energy (and, hopefully, finances!) involved drops exponentially. Or you graduate college but aren’t much invested in anything past that – if your other Important Things are your day!job, your relationship, and gardening, you might end up focusing on those things and find yourself drifting along aimlessly for years.
The worst thing, of course, is for one of the Four Important Things to be an addiction – to drugs, or shopping, or porn, or gambling, or…whatever. I’m not sure there is any way to undo that, in the sense that even in recovery, the addiction itself will always be a Very Important Thing to account for.
Back to my point, which is the fact that I had to sit down and really look at my own schedule with open eyes, and figure out what I can do, and when I can do it. Working out and meditating account for about 30 minutes each, a little more than an hour all told when time for preparing and straightening up afterwards is factored in. Easiest way to knock these out is in the morning, meaning I have to get up a little after 5 AM to have those done by the time I need to get ready for work at 6:30 AM.
Writing is officially my Second Important Thing (hopefully moving up to first here soon). After 11 hours centered on the day!job, my time is outrageously limited, but I have to get in at least an hour and a half every day if I can. That can only happen in the evenings. So I get an hour for dinner when I get home, write from 7 PM to 8:30 PM, and have an hour to goof off, relax, or work on a side hobby. Anything that deviates me from that course will sink the whole plan, because to get up at 5(ish) AM I have to be in bed at the latest at 10 PM.
I really do need one day off a week from the pressure, and that seems to be Saturday. I’d rather write on Saturday, and maybe I can shoehorn it in sometimes, but the truth is that rest days are important too. This is the newer, mature me: understanding limitations and working with them. Trying to do otherwise usually ends with me in a stupor, anyway.
Sunday: back to the grind, even if I get to sleep in.
This means I have to watch for getting caught up in dinner plans with friends, or allowing tumblr to suck me in. It means not writing fanfic for fun, or “vegging out” for the evening, or taking art classes at night, or dating. It means I need to “keep my eyes on the prize” every day, and not sit around staring at the computer waiting for magic to happen.
No room in that schedule for regret or distraction, no room for wishful thinking, no room for self-loathing. These are my Four Important Things, and they are all I have time for.
