Today's episode is inspired by How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days and Andie's gift of a love fern to Ben.
When he nearly kills the fern through a complete lack of attention, she goes into over-the-top theatrical hysterics, asking "Are you gonna let us die?"
How many of us entrepreneurs are letting parts of ourselves die in (alleged) service of our businesses? How many of us put our most joyful and restorative past times on a shelf so that we can focus on our online business or side hustle?
::sheepishly raises hand::
I am 100% guilty of having done this.
- Launching a business is hard work.
- Maintaining flow in an existing business is hard work.
- Finding time to do all the things that just plain old adulting requires is (you guessed it!) hard work.
But I also know that, if I don't carve out time for me, literally nobody else is going to do that. Life and work will gobble up any time I'm hoping to have left over for myself.
As Oliver Burkeman reminds us in one of my all-time favorite books, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals: “The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.”
Our full selves deserve better than leftover shreds of time and settling for slivers of ever-shrinking margins.
The real win is that, when we take time to roll around in something that is genuinely restorative, our lives and our work become infinitely better.
So consider the hobby or activity that you've shelved in an effort towards streamlined productivity and pull it back down off the shelf today.
A counterintuitive cosmic wonder is that you just might find that your work becomes more joyful and productive for the respite your reclaimed hobby gives you - in spite of the extra time it takes to really enjoy it.
A Few Resources Mentioned
Here's the article I mentioned: My Brain Is Itchy & There's No Cream For That
Here's the episode in which my friend Erik Fisher and I discuss taking restorative action: Practical Productivity For The Modern Parent
And here's the free mini course about naming your values: laurengaggioli.com/values
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