![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Never Enough
Apr. 13th, 2005 04:32 pmIt's amazing how projects and errands manage to expand to fill any amount of time available. When I was working full-time I was always busy, but I was never quite so hectic that my life suffered (with the possible exception of a few weeks when I was working more than ten hours a day for more than seven days in a row, which is something that I recommend for noone). I had errands, I had work to do at home, but I always managed to get at least enough done to keep my head above water and feel vaguely productive.
Now I'm working fewer hours overall, though thankfully earning enough money to stay solvent, and I had kind of assumed that I would have more free time - hours to myself lounging around watching daytime television, reading paperback novels, and generally feeling like a woman of leisure. I had visions of tidying the house within an inch of its life, reorganizing my possessions, catching up on correspondence, cooking elaborate meals every night, and generally becoming a model homemaker. Instead, I find my days consumed in errands, projects, and other minutiae of day-to-day life to the point that I'm lucky if I get the dishes washed and groceries bought by the end of the evening. I'm not complaining; I like being busy. But I feel like a failure as a housewife for not vacuuming every week, and I'm not exactly sure where the hours are going and what I'm doing with all my time. If all these things are necessary for me to do, then how did I manage to survive without doing them before? And if they're not needful things, then why do they suddenly manifest just now to devour entire days at a time?
Maybe I just need to learn to prioritize better. That's never been a problem for me before, but maybe now this sudden schedule change has shattered my orderly mind all to heck. Somehow I need to convince myself that washing dishes and vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom and sweeping the porch are all more important than translating sixteenth-century cookbooks and walking to the library to return overdue books and buying new Lush products and crocheting.
Right. I'll start re-prioritizing right now. As soon as I'm done here....
Now I'm working fewer hours overall, though thankfully earning enough money to stay solvent, and I had kind of assumed that I would have more free time - hours to myself lounging around watching daytime television, reading paperback novels, and generally feeling like a woman of leisure. I had visions of tidying the house within an inch of its life, reorganizing my possessions, catching up on correspondence, cooking elaborate meals every night, and generally becoming a model homemaker. Instead, I find my days consumed in errands, projects, and other minutiae of day-to-day life to the point that I'm lucky if I get the dishes washed and groceries bought by the end of the evening. I'm not complaining; I like being busy. But I feel like a failure as a housewife for not vacuuming every week, and I'm not exactly sure where the hours are going and what I'm doing with all my time. If all these things are necessary for me to do, then how did I manage to survive without doing them before? And if they're not needful things, then why do they suddenly manifest just now to devour entire days at a time?
Maybe I just need to learn to prioritize better. That's never been a problem for me before, but maybe now this sudden schedule change has shattered my orderly mind all to heck. Somehow I need to convince myself that washing dishes and vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom and sweeping the porch are all more important than translating sixteenth-century cookbooks and walking to the library to return overdue books and buying new Lush products and crocheting.
Right. I'll start re-prioritizing right now. As soon as I'm done here....
