Finding Balance...

Photo from Morguefile.

One of the hardest things to do when you're an author in my opinion is finding the balance between your writing, editing and publishing and your day job and just everything else that life throws at you. It's something that I've been working on for years and this last year I've been failing pretty miserably in most cases. I do quite a bit of freelance work on top of my day job and so my writing has taken a back seat to everything else in my life. Throw in a lot of overtime with my job at the hospital and you can guess how frustrating that can be at times.

Initially I thought if I set a schedule for myself with this blog that I'd be able to keep it, but as usually happens, my day job, my home life and my freelance work got in the way. While I was able to keep it for a few weeks, continuing became difficult when the time just wasn't there. And there's another thing, this thing called time and how we use it. Why is it that we always think we don't have enough time. The truth is I think at least for me is that I don't manage my time well. In fact, I'm lousy at it, and I'll be the first to admit it. So that's one part of me finding balance as an author that I've been working on.

The main thing with time is that I'm finding I have to work on training myself to focus on what I'm doing this moment. For example, in this moment I'm writing this article. So, the trick is whenever my mind wanders to what I'm going to make for dinner tonight, what I have to get at the store, the statements I need to print out so I can pay my school loan payment, and when I'm going to do my taxes that I work on gently bringing my mind back to the task at hand which is writing this article. We get so caught up in what's coming up or what has happened ie we got a bad review for example that we don't focus on the present. My Native American ancestors were actually really good at focusing on the present tasks and I think it's an important part of finding balance to adopt this habit. It's not easy by any means, but it does work when you continue to employ it. I also find I get much more done when I focus on the task at hand. We've become such a society of multi-taskers that it's not any wonder that we feel so frantic all the time. We rarely give our brains a break to just think about one thing at a time.

Since I've begun doing this paying attention to what I'm doing in the moment I mean, I've actually begun writing again. Wonder of wonders, with just this little tip to help me find some balance in my author life, I've begun writing again. Imagine that!