A short contract job working for an advertising agency changed how I think about every day. We billed our clients hourly and tracked our own work. This made sure that we were staying balanced individually and billing accurately.
I’m going through what a friend jokingly referred to as “wedding withdraw”. I recently completed my graduate degree, I’m helping start a new church community and hunting for a job. It’s a strange season where my days are unstructured and my goals are self-directed. This has left me with a constant sense of fear/guilt about not accomplishing anything.
A friend of mine is a Quaker and Ignatian trained spiritual director. When I shared my anxiety with him, I assumed he would tell me to get in touch with my true self or trust in the grace of God. Instead, he suggested I could do the same thing I did at the agency: track my hours.
At first this sounded really unspiritual. I was hoping for some hocus-pocus prayer or a productivity strategy. What I realized was I just needed to be more mindful of what I was already doing. The best way to do this was to take the time to be aware of time.
Suddenly, everything from writing this blog to putting away laundry has a new significance. I have a good idea of what I did, and how long it took. I am also aware of how much time I “wasted”, surfing the web or watching Netflix. The encouraging thing is, most days, I actually did something!
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