Do more

The other day while texting with my one remaining childhood friend, I had this brilliant idea. It's so simple that I don't know why doing this had never crossed my mind, but it happened at exactly the right time, I think.

I have ample amounts of time on my hands. Perhaps ample isn't the right word. I am not busy enough that I can't get the things done that I need to get done, though, and yet I often don't. My apartment is a disaster, for starters, and I am doing well to exercise once a week. I, in theory, have time to exercise every day. In fact, the only day I have been exercising is on my busiest day. You want to know why? Because I plan it into my busiest day.

My problem is that after working, doing something for school, or spending all day at my internship, I don't really want to do anything. Actually, that's not it. It's not that I don't want to do anything. It's that if I don't have something planned, I won't do anything. And by, "I won't do anything," I mean that I will watch a few hours of Friends, The Big Bang Theory, and/or The Office. I will do it under the guise that I will clean, cook, do laundry, or some other productive thing while I'm watching, but that never happens.

So childhood friend and I are texting and talking about all the things we need to get done but never seem to actually do, and I realize that if I just unplugged myself for one day each week, or even a few hours each week, my life would be so much more productive.

Today was the first trial of my new idea, and it was a huge success. Nothing I did was crazy. I cleaned all the clutter off my desk, put fresh sheets on my bed, unpacked my suitcase from when I was petsitting a few weeks ago when brother and sister-in-law 3 were still in the hospital with my nephew, and a few other random things.

Part of why this was so successful is that the only electronic thing I used was my old iPod to listen to music. That was it. If I had something that I needed to look up or do on the computer, I wrote it down on a list. I know myself well enough to know that I can't get online or open my computer without doing at least twice as many things as I had intended on doing.

One of the things on my list was to type up the notes I had written for a conference I went to over a year ago. It's amazing how many things you forget. In my notes, I had this written:

"Do more of what you love and less of what you hate."

Well duh. What a great idea. It seems so obvious. I don't do many things in life that I don't like to do, although they do occur. I know it isn't always that straight forward, but still.

May I strive to live a life that allows me to wake up every day doing more of what I love and less of what I don't than I did the day before.