Parenting taught me the value of my free time
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So, becoming a parent is a big deal. A really, really, really big deal. The weight of responsibility is enormous. You’re responsible for a whole other human being.
But also the time commitment. It’s really, really hard to express how much time gets devoted to parenting. Especially in the early years.
So when parenting came along, it was a shock to my system. My free time went from hours a day to sometimes minutes. (Infanthood is in a category of its own for being an all-consuming time drain. Even if you have a free moment, you’re sleeping or trying to sleep.)
Two things happened:
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I started to value my free time very highly. It became precious.
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I was forced to re-evaluate how I wanted to used my rare, precious free time.
Because I was shocked out of my previous time-wasteful habits, I found myself thinking a lot about the bigger picture. It was now going to take me weeks to accomplish a small project that would previously have been a single weekend marathon. I thought harder about the projects available to me. Did I really want to spend weeks on that little side-quest? Or would I rather work on something more meaningful to me?
It worked. I found myself sticking with a single project, putting in 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there. Eventually, I was finishing them!
Thus, the paradox was complete: A massive reduction in personal free time lead to a massive increase in finishing projects.
Having less of a thing meant valuing it more and completely reconsidering not just how I was spending it, but, to some degree, how I wanted to spend my life.
Things have eased up now that the kids are older, but the lessons have stuck.
I keep a project notebook (TODO: article pending, link it here) and write down ideas so I don’t lose them. But I try to only start the ones I really want to do.