Time Management = YES!

Can I really do it all? Yes, I can! I know, we aren’t supposed to overload ourselves and I am always preaching the necessity to slow down and take time for peace, solitude and silence.

I started a new job.

The opportunity arose and I believed I should take it. But here’s the issue: I have worked hard to get to this point in my writing career and am therefore not at all willing to let go, even if the “real job” provides benefits and more than enough to pay for living expenses.

Four weeks ago I was peacefully sitting alone under trees writing – writing for myself and writing for others. My mind was free to explore the creative aspects of just about everything it encountered. Now it is dark under the trees when I get up and dark again when I return home. Now I walk (still barefooted) crowded hallways packed with college students and my mind is overloaded with details and logistics.

The job is overwhelming, the system chaotic, the demands greater than time allowed to meet them. Still, I am not willing to fore go my writing for the sake of the regular income. So I have to say yes, I CAN do it all!

Time Management – oh yeah! I remember that! Time management, realistic thinking, and compartmentalization skills have been thrown to the forefront of my priorities. I had already been practicing these things because my writing is literally all over the place – diversity in clients demanded compartmentalizing my thoughts and activities; deadlines required that I devote time to planning and scheduling my assignments, and the overall survival skill was to recognize my abilities and limitations and accept them: realistic thinking.

So now it is the same process, only magnified.

Before I started the job, I wrote two week’s worth of blog posts for my four regular blogs (pendants, bracelets, Forever My Momma and this one) in preparation. Other work would fall where it could.

Now, during the week I only have time to answer emails and take notes for the writing work to be done on the weekends. Each morning I have to fully and completely put my head in school – my body somehow follows. On the weekends, I rise early in the morning and go to the park. Settling under the trees, I enter my writing world where I write for myself and for others. The week’s notes fall into place and still, I believe, I CAN do it all.

When I accepted the job offer, I believed I could do it all. I couldn’t possibly have known how hard the job would be (had I known, I would have said “NO”). Nonetheless, I intend to maintain the belief that I can do it all. After all, isn’t half the challenge of making something rooted in the belief? Oh yes, faith is the driving force.


And so it is with faith that I balance all these new demands packed into short, intense hours, and maintain my commitment to my true passions and dreams: I write.

Time management, realistic thinking, and compartmentalization skills: years of cultivating these things are reaping rewards now when I need them the most.