The Time Spending Paradox

It’s been a month since I wrote my first blog article. Some friends already asked how things were going.

During the first weeks, not good, actually. More about that below. The risk was to have launched a blog but actually not being able to accomplish any of the ideas I spoke about. But that was not the case. Things got better.

So, in the meantime I DID start new things that are fun to do. I do sports now twice a week. I cook more often in the evenings. Jazz academy has started again, and I played in a jam in a pub for the first time. I created a fun video with my family for the marriage anniversary of my parents. And last but not least: I went shopping for electronics and started building my first project: my own saxophone looping pedals!

For people that don’t know what looping pedals are: you can use them while improvising on your music instrument, to loop certain fragments. You can control them with your feet.

Of course, right now it’s just a prototype. I want to know for sure that I can make it work, before building a proper case for the pedals and buying an expensive saxophone microphone. But it’s still work in progress. Recording and handling audio in real time seems to be a hard thing to program. But I can’t wait to try it out, if I ever get it to work!

I already mentioned I had troubles on the way. I really wanted to work more on this thing, but after all daily routines and plans with family, friends and so on, I had virtually NO spare time left to do it.

I came to the conclusion that I must be planning too much things in one week. But at the same time I LIKE doing most of those things. And I feel obligated, or responsible, to do even others. So the strategy I had, was, like many others would try to do: just trying to be fast and efficient. That way I could do a lot of amazing things!  But I have been wondering for some time, why then it was that, at the end of a day or a week, I could not tell what I had been doing all that time. Well… then it must be that it wasn’t that amazing after all…

So that was why I called this article The Time Spending Paradox. Big words, I know.

I talked about these frustrations – I really wanted to PLAY with my little hobby project, you see? – with some friends and colleagues. One of them showed me the page of the International Institute of Not Doing Much. It’s a collection of articles that uncovers, with a lot of British humor, ideas about how we, the busy idiots, are trying to get the most out of our time, and actually just waste it.

So I embraced that site as a source of ideas and, above all, try to pay more attention on my planning. Improving at this point took its time, and STILL takes its time. The music looping pedals are challenging to build too. These are the reasons why it took a month to write a new article, and why the next article will take its time too.

But in the meantime I already learned a lot.