Life Tips Daily

Tip of the Day: Pace Yourself!

Picture this: You live the normal, active life of an ambitious, savvy person. One day you’re offered the opportunity to do something that you absolutely love after work twice a week. It’s not a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or anything but, knowing that you’d really like to, you accept and promise that you’ll do it. Then the next day you recieve another similar opportunity to do something you would love. Again, you accept because it’s something you’d really like to do. If the cycle continues too far, you’ll have a schedule so packed with activities that it’ll be impossible to keep up with; even though you like the stuff.

One of the biggest problems facing people these days is that they let their ambitions cloud their judgement and impair their perception of what they can manage. Since hobbies are becoming more and more accessible, people are participating more. By focussing blindly on all of the things they want to do, they fall into a dangerous trap; running out of time to do it all in.

That is why one of the most important things to keep in mind is time management. If you can’t manage your time among your work, and activities then you’re going to waste too much of it and end up being able to do even less of the things you’d like to. The problem is that sometimes we want to do something so much that we just accept it and make promises.

I can give a personal example of just how problematic this can become and did become for me. As a composer for video games, I work from project to project on contracts. Sometimes, these projects overlap and I end up working on more than one at a time. This happened to me at one point last year to the point of excess.

Specifically, I had been offered the opportunity to write the music for a large-scale mod (modification of an existing game, usually adding new content, levels, etc) of a popular RPG title and, eager for more experience, I accepted. The work load was certainly manageable and I was happily producing their music for a few weeks. Then I got another offer from another large-scale mod to write their music. Again, I was eager for more experience and more of an opportunity to get my music out there and further my career, so I accepted.

By the time the third game project rolled around, I was starting to have some major problems. I was needing to balance between work on these game projects, my school work, my other extra-curricular activities, and essential bodiliy functions like eating and sleeping. Even though I loved the work I was doing for these projects, I simply couldn’t keep up with everything. It was too much on my plate at the same time and it started to show in degrading marks at school, and physical and mental exhaustion on my part after too long of staying up until 3:00am composing.

I learned a valuable lesson, which I am sharing here today, which is to pace yourself even when it comes to the things you love to do. No matter how much you enjoy them, overloading your schedule will do nothing except detract from your operating efficiency and tire you out.

So keep things balanced!

• You need time to get all work done and leave some margin for unexpected problems that might arise.
• Then you need time to do a comfortable number of extra activities and hobbies which serve as pleasant leisure; not exhaustive effort. Remember, these are things you love that help you keep your brain from rotting after the tedium of a work day, they shouldn’t make you more tired.
• You need time to relax! This isn’t being lazy, it’s being smart. Time to relax lets your body and your mind unwind a bit.

What you want to aim for is the schedule set-up that keeps you active, but rested so that you’re operating at your peak efficiency. Sometimes you’ll just have to say no to those tempting opportunities to keep things in check, so just keep in mind that it’s for the best.

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Note to self: prepare for Halloween. And this time, use a shorter candle in the jack-o-lantern to avoid having to clean up pumpkin char stains…