In the mornings I always have my cell phone close by and check it often to make sure that I am ‘on schedule’. Every morning we have the same routine (except for weekends), and everything slots in right after one another. So if I am late for one thing, it moves/pushes the whole morning schedule out.
Anyway, as I was busy giving the parrots their food in the morning, I saw I also still had to do their water AND feed the baby birds before going to horses. I went all “Oh no, I don’t have enough time to do aaaaaalll of these things before horses!!”. Those type of thoughts raise a flag – because I know this whole time thing gets blown out of proportion in my head). So instead of doing one over the other (feed the birdies vs give parrots water) – I wanted to see if I really could not do both. I only had so many minutes left, but started with the parrot water and was able feed the birds in time for me to go down and take Charlie for a run before he goes to the field! I also timed each one of the points, and realised the parrot water for instance, only takes TWO minutes to do – and feeding the birdies (after the food is already been made warm), only takes like 5 minutes. So in my head, as I am faced with these points I still have to finish, I in my mind imagine me taking out each of the parrot water bowls, which they’ve made all dirty with their food, chucking the water away, cleaning the bowls, and filling them with the tiny filter tap in the kitchen (which runs slow and thin). So in my mind I look at all these steps and I’m saying to myself NO WAY, there is just NO WAY that I can do ALL OF THAT, in the 10 minutes that are left. I should just do it later, when I have moooree time.
So, I used to act on that, which would then result in me getting to it only after horses, which is like 30-45 minutes later in the morning --- because I thought that ‘it’s just not possible’, it takes ‘so much time’. But, in reality – it only takes 2 minutes. I keep on finding myself in situations where I know I have to do something, then look at the time and go “oh no, not gonna happen, look at the time, there’s just no way I can squeeze this in, there’s no point” – where I so could have done whatever it was that I had to do, but I didn’t, because I *thought* that tasks X would take me that much longer.
So it’s interesting to see what thoughts do, they really have some amazing power! They make things up that are not real and then screw with your life because you believed them lol – and then you wonder why your life’s messed up.
Clocks and time are supposed to help us manage our life more effectively, but how can we use time as an indicator effectively if we’re completely clueless about actual reality and how long things actually take. Many times I have an important task to do, like and assignment, and I will keep on postponing it because each time I think that ‘it’s not worth it’, because ‘I only have so much time left’. Looking at the clock and finding out what the time is, becomes just another excuse to postpone and not do the things you’ve kind of already secretly decided not to do in the first place – but now we can use time as our ally, because apparently the maths adds up in our favour.
So I’ve been practicing the point of actually checking how long things take, so that I can’t bullshit myself into not doing them simply because I *think* it takes such and such amount of time, while instead of measuring actual time, we’re simply measuring our level of resistance towards something – and then the time we think it takes is basically a translation of how much we not want to do something.
To be continued…
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