Being more intentional with your time

I like many of you set New Year’s goals. I do it every year. My birthday is also right around that time so it’s always a good time to refresh my perspective on life and what I want to focus on for this years trip around the sun.

Most years it’s obvious things like lose X amount of weight or read X amount of books. The usual stuff. This year is different.

This year it’s all about one thing and one thing only.

Time.

I came across this image on Substack notes from Lewis O’Brien. This serves as an important reminder of how time is perceived the older we get. Lately I’ve felt that the routine of life has sped up days to the point where often times the days feel over before they’ve begun.

So how do we slow things down?

How do we be more intentional with our time?

This is what I wanted to solve this year. This is my only goal. To improve my time management skills to at least give myself the illusion of control over time.

So what to do?

I invested in a calendar app. Fantastical.

I hated having a calendar app for work and one for the rest of my life. It was tough to manage both and I never really did. Plus I also had multiple types of personal calendars for my family, my son's school, and more. I needed a tool that let me manage all of this in one place. Reminders app is something I also leverage a lot to organize my todos. Fantastical allows me to integrate those into their app as well. So far the app is solving my management problem.

Now with all that sorted. The real problem has exposed itself. Doing the thing you've carved out time to do. This is the actual hard part and unfortunately something I'm still working through.

For now though I'm pleased to have an system that is working so far. I'll report back with any insights as this progresses.