I Figured It Out

Okay, I figured it out. It actually wasn’t so hard. It just required me taking a good, honest look at how I’m spending my time.

I’m actually quite good at time management. I track my work hours to the minute using TaskTime4 (which is great), and I’m a planner by nature, so the problem was not in either of those arenas.

The truth is, I’m losing 3 to 4 hours a day to two new activities.

The first I’m actually quite proud of. I’m training for a seriously hard-core obstacle race called the Tough Mudder. My friend Alex, who is also in my writing group, convinced me to run it with her in February. It’s 10-12 miles, with a crazy obstacle ever mile or so. I’m a little scared, no wait – correction – I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. I’ve never run a race of any kind, let alone one designed by British Special Forces to kick your ass from here ’til Sunday.

So to avoid any serious embarrassment on the course, I decided to train using the Insanity workout program. It, too, is stupid hard. I mean ridiculous. But for the first five weeks it was a 35 minute workout, which (even with a shower after) fit nicely into a lunch break. Now that I’m into the second half of the program the workouts are closer to 50 minutes. Once you factor in shower and a snack after, it kind of starts to spill into the category of time suck. Still, I only have three weeks left. After that I should be in perfect shape, and will never have to work out again. Yep. Never again.

Okay, not really. But I am loving how I’m feeling, so while I may not keep up my workouts at this intensity after three more weeks, I will need to find some consistent method of keeping in shape.

The other 3 hours a day that I am pissing away, I am not so proud of. I’m ready to admit, here, on my blog, that I have a serious “Breaking Bad” problem. I can’t help myself. My guy and I watch an average of three episodes a night, all the while cursing Netflix for their convenient streaming form of distribution. We both have so much we could be doing with that time, but now that we’re in the fourth season it’s almost as if we’re pushing through to the end just so we can be done with it and go on with our lives. How appropriated that it’s a show about meth. We are junkies for it.

So mystery solved. If I want to have more time to work on my novel I need to put down the remote and step away from the TV.

Or, I could go for the cigarettes in the closet option and stay up all night tonight to watch all the remaining episodes straight through.

But that would be crazy. Right?