One of my greatest life challenges, as it may be for many others, is to find a balance beteen work and personal life. As we spend many days and hours in the grind, one of my goals is to find as happy medium between work and life. I strongly believe in a less busy lifestyle for many people, a stronger focus on self care, furthered education, environmental preservation, conservation, and maintaining a better tomorrow.
I started by making checklists for tasks using Microsoft To Do and the iOS Reminders app for structure and some sense of completion. I have numerous projects at work, and the constant pull of notifications, messages, emails, tickets, and reactive tasks to events during the workday create distraction and make it difficult to make any progress. So I’ve also started to block out focus time and silenced most notifications to increase productivity on the important tasks at hand.
I’m managing to mold my time into something more productive instead of reactive. Enabling myself to become more of a creative instead of the robot of the service industry. Days run together and life becomes a black hole of work, without any vision of progress or accomplishment. Now I’m using tools to reinforce myself in knowing that I am doing enough, and that I am working towards something better.
I’m reaching my 10th year in my career and the pandemic has been an eye opening experience into the world of academia and business. I’ve started to feel more talented and energized to accomplish new things. The problem is the roadblocks of wanting to do too many things at once and quickly becoming burnt out. I’ve started creating mental goals and have started to visualize accomplishments but quickly turn into systematic thought crashes and discouragement.
Creating documents that visualize and plan will help form a strategy and structure to accomplish these goals. This structured approach to career goals and peronal development should lead to intentional time management, a more strategic approach to completing projects, and a focus on accomplishing personal and work goals more efficiently and effectively. I can also look back on what I’ve started, how far I’ve progressed, and add notes on the goal. It’s not something I normally talk about but I was diagnosed with ADHD at a very young age. I’d like to think of this as focus hell as my brain is easily distracted by a new shiny interest, and what was in focus is lost in shadow memory.
My main goals for 2021 are to become more organized, create a plan to find a career that is more fulfilling with true growth in diversity, to polish my current skillset, learn at least 1 programming language, become a better baker, engingeering, and use resources to continue my education through SkillShare, Linkedin Learning, or Coursera.org. A lot of these goals go hand in hand so I can see spending time on Coursera for example would lead to blocking out time for studies, thus involving more planning and strategizing time and not spending a fortune on an educational experience.
Lo and behold December has arrived and I have a plan before the New Year begins. It feels warm to have set forth goals to accomplish and a plan that will hopefully grow and evolve as I’m able to tick those checkboxes on an ever growing list of things I want to build, create, and learn. Hopefully I won’t take on too much at once and remind myself that what I’m doing is enough for now and that there’s time and room for personal growth. Maybe we’ll plant something new next year too.
The Hylian Vegan 
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