On Breaking Away from Being ‘Too Busy’ #ChattyBlogs – May Linky

If you have been following my blog for some time now, you must have heard the 100 million times I have mentioned being too busy or too rushed with too much to do in too little time. If I hadn’t written those blog posts, I probably wouldn’t have noticed this pattern, but when I put it down in writing, I just couldn’t escape the reality of what my life had become.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t ever lying. I was indeed pretty busy. And it wasn’t just the ‘routinely busy’ kind of situation either. We were going through some major life changes.

I joined the corporate world after a break of 6 years. It was something that I had wanted to do from a long time, but when it actually happened, it was quite the adjustment. We had to essentially move out of our comfort zones and figure out a new way of doing pretty much everything.

A few months after that, we bought & moved into our very first house in the US – a completely novel experience for us, which filled us with a lot of joy, but equally overwhelmed us. Everywhere we looked, there was too much to do.

Then when we were barely getting settled in the new house, we got the news that my sister was getting married in a few months. And while that might not seem like a big deal to many of you, trust me on this – Indian weddings are quite the production, with a lot of moving parts.

Moreover, the wedding was going to take place in India, which meant we had to work out the logistics of an India trip, which (if you are an NRI you know) is a mammoth task in itself.

Long story short, I found myself in an eternally busy state, where I did not have the time or energy to do anything beyond the things that had to be done, like the day-to-day chores, so I ended up procrastinating everything else – even the things that were important to me – from relatively smaller projects like wanting to sort and organize the family photos, to planning family vacations, starting a food blog…this was a long list.

In my mind, I could always do them later, when I was relatively free (ha!), or when I had more time to focus on these “extras”. But these undone things were important to me, so even though I procrastinated them, they were never out of my mind, which left me with a constant feeling of dissatisfaction.

Then, last week, as I was randomly sifting through my work records, I saw that I would be soon completing a year at my current workplace. That took me by surprise; as in my mind, it did not seem possible that a whole year could have passed.

This little fact also made me realize that it had been one full year since this cycle of being busy had started. One year since I thought that I could do those tasks ‘later’.

And now it was ‘later’, but nothing much had changed. Here I was, still as busy as ever, this time busy figuring out home decor, gardening, and researching big and small home projects; still procrastinating the same things as last year, still equally disgruntled with myself (if not more).

I can’t tell you how hard this realization struck me. I knew I had to make some changes, as I could not expect different results if I did the same things over and over again. I had to figure out a way of living my life, without procrastinating the things important to me, while still doing what needed to be done.

Because the last thing I wanted to do is to have life pass me by, while I obsessed over being too busy, and not having enough time to do anything.

Which is why, I have now decided to get better at keeping my priorities straight, while striving towards maintaining a good balance, between what has to be done, and what I want to do, and accomplish a little bit of everything.

My quarterly goals are definitely helping me with this, but I know this balance is something that I would need to strive towards every single day, and going forward I will. Because I owe it to myself.

That’s all from my end folks. I would love to hear from you guys. Have you guys experienced something like this as well? Felt like you lived in an eternal state of ‘busy’? What did you do to overcome it? Do share!

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

The #ChattyBlogs Linky: A monthly linky which goes up on the first Sunday of every month, and is open for 2 weeks.

Here’s how it works:

1. Write a chatty/rambly post – it could be a deep, thought-provoking one or even a random ramble. No judgement here.
2. At the bottom of your post – add the #ChattyBlogs badge, and link to this post (which hosts the linky) to encourage other bloggers to join in.
3. Add your link to the #ChattyBlogs linky.
4. Visit and comment on the fellow bloggers’ post in the linky.
5. Enjoy!
   

     Chatty Blogs Badge

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Note: I have also created a twitter handle for ChattyBlogs & registered the actual hashtag #ChattyBlogs. So, when you do write and link up your posts, please do use the hashtag & I will be sure to RT & share it.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥