There’s a well-known rule in corporate management: Be the ruler of your email lest you be ruled. It’s death by a thousand cuts, the rabbit hole of email where things just keep going and going, the never-ending email thread…you get the picture. If you work on email first you’ll never work on anything else for the rest of the day. If you make email the priority you’ll go epostal eventually. You have to prioritize correctly, put boundaries around the many headed hydra of email interactions *whispers ‘Hail Hydra!’* and that way you can have the rest of your energy and your day to get actual things done.
Same thing goes for regular life. If it feels like what you actually want to do, who you actually want to be, is a heat mirage on the road of life, never really there and always out of reach, it isn’t necessarily because you’re missing something, but that you’re putting your energy into everything else. We think things like: If I can just get the kids out of school, then I can focus on me…If I can just get all of these meetings done then I can wedge what I want to do in between work and picking the kids up/meeting my sweetie, going to this group…If I can get all these chores done today then I have all day tomorrow to work on my own things…If….
Death by a thousand other things to do than what I’m here to do. Death through busy work and other commitments and other people and other priorities and everything else but that one small thing that is unique to you and only you can do. If you aren’t the ruler of your life then it rules you. It doesn’t require an act of God, any strength of will or any cataclysmic event to change this, just adjust the timing. I will work on the thousand things I have to do between these hours whether I finish or not. This will leave me time to do what I’m here to do and still live the rest of my life. And once you make that shift you’ll find the emails still seem to get taken care of, work still continues to get done, the world doesn’t end, life doesn’t come to a stand still, and you have brought blessings into the world for all of us that only you can bring. Bonus. 🙂