Hello everyone!
As depressing as the title may sound, it’s quite accurate to what I’ve been experiencing these past few months. I’ve recently started a new job that’s changed my schedule to be a bit easier for me to manage getting eight hours of sleep. I never realized how much of a difference that a proper eight hours of sleep can have on my body and my mind. I’m still adjusting but I can feel myself being able to focus better and actually make progress on my various projects. But honestly, trying to stay disciplined and focused in this day and age is such a struggle.
I had a bit of an epiphany earlier this week has been making me think about things more carefully. Removing the eight hours a day for work and eight hours for sleep, assuming some time lost in commute for those of us that work in office as well, we have roughly 70-ish hours a week to ourselves to allocate accordingly. It sounds like a very long time but then you think about how that 70-ish hours is broken up across the week in mostly small chunks during the weekdays and then you get Saturday and Sunday, it can feel hard to utilize that time effectively.
Being absolutely truthful, ever since I started working again, I haven’t been able to use that time effectively or as efficiently as I want to. It’s something that I want to try and get better at actually utilizing my time to be able to focus on the projects that I feel so motivated and actually passionate about that give my life meaning. But the way I treat those aspects of my life that I consider most important to me, one would think I didn’t care about them at all. My work ethic has floundered and my previous job left me mentally drained where I couldn’t think or focus. But now I feel that this healthier work environment is helping me reorient how I live my life and hopefully become more productive.
Now to actually discuss how my writings have been going and honestly, not progressing as much as I would want it to be. I want to still publish my fourth book by sometime next year but my initial goal was to publish it by the end of this year. I have not been writing as much as I should be and I want to correct this, especially since now I’m writing both my fourth book and a manga series. I’ve struggled to progress my book series writing and I keep rewriting the beginning of my manga that I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. And there’s something I’ve been missing that I feel like I need to start doing again, something that always gave me joy and life.
I want to start reading again.
It’s the one thing I realized I stopped doing over the past year and a half ever since I first lost my job. Ever since I stopped reading it feels like everything else has kind of been slipping as well. I want to start rebuilding that habit and replacing my social media use with reading again. I want to get back on track with reading and writing. Right now my life feels unfocused and I want to fix that.
And I wish the best to you all trying to focus as well.
– Raphael
Raph's Cozy Musings 