Me time

After my overly hectic week, reading Cherryripe’s post about her experiences with yoga, made me think about what we need to make our lives meaningful and balanced.

I am not one of those people for whom work is the be all and end all, even though most of my waking hours are spent at work. Still, while I am at work, it is very important to me that the work I am doing is useful in some way, and that the impact it has on other people is positive and useful. This might sound like a strange thing to say (isn’t work always going to be useful?), but I am sure you know what I mean when I say that sometimes politics, egos and sheer stupidity can get in the way of doing things that should be useful. (See Dilbert or The Office for commentary on the state of work as we know it, in the early 21st century, in The West.)

Basically I want to be happy about the work I am doing. I really like the fact that librarianship is such a “helping” profession. (I don’t think I am expressing myself very well here, but never mind. I sometimes envy those librarians who can create and maintain blogs (and CVs) that show how much, and how well, they think about all those issues that affect our profession. For me I think this blog will continue to contain mostly my thoughts on personal issues. Although, if one year from now I am still writing here, who knows what will have happened?)

I know I am really fortunate to be doing work that is usually interesting and fulfilling. And despite being in the Australian university sector, which is undergoing a lot of change (or maybe upheaval would be a better word to describe it) at the moment, my work conditions are generally good. I have great colleagues, and there are lots of great people at the university.

Still, work is not everything. The challenge is to have balance, but this can sometimes be difficult for me. I thought I’d look at what an average day in the life of CW is, by looking at the number of hours in a day and working out how much of an average day is spent doing various things. I initially assumed that I wasn’t going to have much time left for “me time”, but after factoring in work (7.5 hours), travel to and from work (1 hour), and sleep (8 hours), 7.5 hours of the day were unaccounted for. Of the remaining 7.5 hours, at least 2.5 of these hours are definitely time I spend by myself in the mornings. Of the remaining 5 hours, there is time spent with M. Much of this often includes the evening meal, and tv or dvd viewing (say 2-3 hours). I wonder what I do with the remaining couple of hours. (Surely it’s not all spent in the loo!) And I haven’t even looked at weekends, which are often unplanned, and only a small proportion of the time on weekends consists of “must do” kinds of things.

I am quite surprised to see that in reality I have quite a lot of “me time”. I imagine parents must have much less, and many other people have lots of other commitments that eat into their time. I’m not sure why, despite having so much time, I sometimes feel as rushed or unbalanced as I do. Maybe I need to be using my time more wisely. Or maybe it would help for me to savour the time and be more.. mindful.. of what I am doing, when I am doing it. Maybe I have too much me time!

Categories: work-life-balance