Dear Reader,
If you read my first newsletter, you might have found yourself thinking, gee, you have a lot of stuff on your plate for someone wanting to focus on self care.
Were you thinking that? Just me?
I've always known time is a finite resource. It's one of the few things we cannot change, stockpile, or get more of. But this didn't truly begin to sink in until last year. I was feeling so overwhelmed with work and passion projects while stubbornly refusing to give up anything I loved to do. Work, art, my business—these were things I couldn't bring myself to budge on. So other things fell away instead: household chores, reading for fun, cooking meals, exercise, friendships. But this was unsustainable, and ultimately I felt guilty for not making time for my own health or my relationships.
As the new year approached, I realized I needed to do more than make a few goals—I needed to make some serious changes. But what could I change? Not the number of hours in my day. Not necessarily the passions I wanted to pursue, either. Certainly not the job that helped keep a roof over my head. I knew I either had to change my mindset or my priorities. Or maybe both.
On a walk to the grocery store one afternoon, I began compiling a mental list of how I spend my time. It went something like this: work, sleep, commuting to work, working the work, doing laundry, going grocery shopping, writing, handcrafting earrings, doing inventory for my business, cleaning the house, spending mornings with my husband, reading, and on and on…
A simple pattern emerged.
I have to work a minimum of 8 hours a day to stay employed. I need about 8 hours of sleep to function at my most optimal (and for my overall health). That leaves 8 hours of, theoretically, unclaimed time.
Since sleep and work are non-negotiable to me, any change in my routine or mindset would need to be focused on this 8 hour window, which I’ve decided to call Personal Time. Upon further reflection, I realized everything I do that’s not work or sleep could fall into one of two categories: Maintain or Play.
Maintain: These are the tasks I don’t always love to do but know are needed to keep things running. The laundry. Grocery shopping. Exercise! (Sorry sporty friends, that does not belong under Play for me. But it might for you, and that’s ok.)
Play: These are things that energize me and bring me joy. Making art. Running my business. Rewatching Lost in Space (the Netflix remake) with my husband.
Now, you might be reading this and thinking something snarky like, Great job, Courtney. You’ve successfully solved 8x3=24. That’s not exactly earth shattering. And you would be right! I’m under no illusions that this is by any means revolutionary. I’m almost certain it’s not. But it is how my brain seems to make sense of the big list of things that are important to me, and by reframing my time in this way, balance suddenly seems achievable. Maybe even sustainable.
So much of the overwhelm I felt in 2023 simply came from the fact that I had no concept of what balance could even look like. I’d just accepted that there wasn’t enough time compared to the ocean of tasks on my to-do list, then frantically continued to swim head-on into the pounding waves hoping to somehow stay afloat.
Putting everything on (digital) paper has helped me realize that there is a lot more time than I’d previously thought. My hope is that, by focusing on the 8 hours that I feel I truly have control over, I can better prioritize the things that matter most. That’s the idea, at least. The hypothesis behind the Great Experiment of self-care this year. I’ll keep you posted.
Courtney