I am sitting on a chipped wooden chair outside my apartment. It’s quite worn and weathered from months of rain. I feel bad that I never attend to it–both the weathered furniture and the garden area outside my apartment. The weeds are taller than me and it seems as though wilderness has completely taken over the once neat little perimeter. 

I just don’t have the time. 

This is what I would have said to give it a justification. But in reality, and if I’m being entirely honest with myself, it’s because I don’t want to. Today, I’d rather sunbathe and relax.

The sun is beaming full force on my very delicate skin and I feel my cheeks burning. Although it’s too hot to be here, I do so anyway. Because today, I told myself, the sun is out and it is a good day to spend some time outside. 

Spring has not come yet. I’m in a black sweater that seems to be turning my body into a kind of radiator of heat. Every second it gets a little bit hotter, but the gentle winter-like air keeps me in check about what season of the year it is. 

Sometimes I forget what date it is today, or what specific day of the week it is I’m living. And that’s okay. It’s okay because there’s so much on my plate–so many things to think about, to do, to not forget. The garden, to me, is therefore secondary. I will get to it when the time comes. Just not today.

A friend of mine recently told me–one day I’d like to read a book you write about how you manage to get so many things done and keep up hobbies and side projects outside of work and family life. I thought–a simple story might do just as well. 

I may not have it in me to write a whole book, but I do have it in me to pour out everything that I know about the myth of hyper productivity and time. 

We live in such a complex world. This is a telling sentence. If we zoom into our everyday lives, it’s not much different from this statement. Our lives are like little worlds, little environments of their own–it is what we fight to protect at all costs. 

Sometimes this world is thrown off balance. We postpone our deepest desires telling ourselves that we’ll do it ‘if only we had enough time’. But that time, I must tell you, will never come. 

So we must zoom in even further, and examine how we live our everyday lives. This is when we realize that it is possible to start that business we’ve always dreamed of, to write that novel we’ve put off writing, to learn a new language, to start that project that’s been circulating in your mind for years. 

It’s not about time. It’s not even about productive time. It’s simply about today. It’ll always be about today. 

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I don’t have much of a backstory to tell about myself. I have a day job (remote). I’m writing a novel (in progress), I’m taking on new arts hobbies here and there (to soothe an inner need to create). And I write. Everyday, religiously, I try to write a sentence here and there. I find it quite therapeutic. 

I also have a beautiful daughter and a husband. One side of the family that is at this side of the world, another one in another side of the world. That is a pain I carry with me every day. 

But through it all, I find solace in the eyes of my daughter who’s still so small and enthusiastic about everything. To her, the world is not so complex. In fact, it’s very simple. She simply does what she wants, when she feels like it. And I’ve learned a great deal watching her manipulate this world to work for her and her personality. 

She’s the one that taught me that writing, like speaking, must come intuitively. You might struggle at first, but inventing words is better than staying silent. Being vocal about what you need is better in an indecipherable language–it’s fun for her and certainly funny for my husband and I. 

Day in and day out she peeks from her crib with something new to say. With a smile on her face, my daughter taught me everything I need to know about time and productivity. Mainly, that it is a myth. 

She is two and a half but she’s learning things quickly and at her own pace at the same time. She always finds the time to draw, the time to spend outside playing with soil, the time to build things, destroy my efforts of keeping a neat house, to go through her favorite books, watch cartoons, and make a mess again. 

She does this every day after daycare and I just watch, soaking up some toddler wisdom. She’s so quick to switch tasks to whatever draws her eye. Yet, she’s very orderly about it. Through every activity, she will laugh and have a good time, inevitably involving me. She’s carefree and happy. But also quite productive, if you ask me.

How does a tiny human manage to do it all, and go to bed happy and content? Perhaps it is because she doesn’t care about being productive, or it could also be that she doesn’t know how to tell the time. Either way, those notions are not important to her–she loses herself in her activities.  

I think we adults pressure ourselves a lot to produce, produce, produce. And we lose the fun of doing things that bring us joy. You have the time but maybe not the will to do the things you wish you could do. What if we were to reprogram our brain–to do what we want, when we want it, the way we want to do it?

If you are willing to put down your defense system, things start looking a little brighter. Take a day off work unexpectedly and observe how you spend your day. I think you’ll learn a great deal about where your values lie. 

As a mother, all I can do is take it a day at a time. I don’t build grand plans, I don’t participate in long-term planning, and I don’t set deadlines for when things are due (outside of my day job). 

I could have made this a classical piece with “X things I learned about productivity and time from my 2 year old” but I didn’t. I decided to let spontaneity take over, just the same way my daughter approaches drawing, writing, ‘cooking’, and making a mess. 

It is intuitive. It is fluid and flexible. It is admirable. 

She’s also taught me that words are extremely powerful. Each one she learns, she uses it with vigor and purpose. I want THIS. And I want THAT. And what is THIS. And what is THAT. I’ve adapted those lessons for my own writing and rightfully so. 

Because everything around us is quite curious to a child, I feel that we live in our own heads where we take the extraordinary for granted. Kids teach you a great deal about the extraordinary. Your shadow. The sun rays. The moon. The way plants grow. It’s all new, and something even I struggle to explain. But with time, I will learn to have at least some of the answers. 

The question of how I manage my time has no real magic behind it. I think it’s good to build routine around your family life at home, because without routine, it’s hard to rely on the predictability you so desperately need (if you want to get more things done). 

I don’t have crazy organized time tables on my fridge, but I do know when my daughter will go to sleep, and when she will wake up, and the times she’ll take a nap. You have to build out these habits to have a sustainable life. 

I know for a fact that I have exactly 8 hours to do my work while she’s at daycare. This gives me predictability. In a way, here I have no choice but to be my most productive self. 

I also know that I have exactly an hour’s lunch break during which at least 15 minutes can be set aside for writing. That is how you squeeze in your project planning – day by day, 15 minutes at a time, it adds up to quite a lot in a month. And you can get a surprising amount of ‘work’ done. The one thing you can do is ‘borrow’ your own time–but borrow it like you mean it. 

There are days when I have a whole day to myself (special thank you goes to the grandparents). To say I make the most of it is hardly enough. I savor it, devour it, and own it, because that time is mine. I work like a mad man and bathe in my own internal sunshine afterwards. Having a day to yourself is a bit of a luxury for me nowadays. 

Putting in hours a day is a great advantage to living up to your dreams. Some of us have 15 minutes and that’s just as good. You’re getting it done but at your own pace. For me and my usual routine, it is a balance of stealing an hour here and 15 minutes there, when I can and where I can. But I juggle up to five projects to diversify my ‘work outside of work’ and that keeps me going. 

That is how I manage to get a lot done I suppose. The way I’d tell my very good friend as to how I’ve done it would be this – I did it really, really slowly. Five minutes here, 10 there, half an hour here and an hour there. But through it all, I committed to my projects. I kept them different enough to keep me going. And the days when I had just a day to myself – I showed up and delivered. 

My projects are all before me on the table the same way my daughter’s toys are on their shelves. What she does is reach the first thing she really desires to play with, and I reach for the first thing that motivates me enough to start working. It’s not easy, and I never said it will be but it is a start. 

Reflecting on parenthood, I realize you can’t always be perfect. I broke down in tears when it was too much, when I couldn’t find extra energy to devote to my daughter after work. It breaks my heart. But you can go to sleep a little earlier, and wake up not a bit earlier each day, but wake up with a new attitude and new energy to start your day. 

That is my other trick. Every day that I wake up, I don’t carry over my grudges and struggles from the day before the same way my toddler does not. Waking up with a clean slate creates opportunity instead of an obstacle for my mood and attitude for the day. 

With each day, you wake up and try again. And you try a little harder. Or adjust to sprinkle that little more effort towards the life you’re trying to live up to. Our lives are made up of little actions, little moments in the day that form our habits. The only way forward is a day at a time. 

That is the short story of how I wrote a part of a novel, started a side project, and found time to help my husband with his career, how we (almost) started a business. We have a lot on our plates but we also are reminded by the little angel running around us that we cannot control it all–and if you cannot control it all, change that which you can and move on. A day at a time.