I was recently having a Zoom discussion with a bunch of online peers. Most were acknowledging, if not outright complaining, about how over-scheduled their lives are.
Earlier in the call I had confessed that while a lot of them are taking this month off for vacation, I had never taken a vacation in my life. I am totally serious.
I don’t know what that is. Every trip I’ve ever taken in my life was because I was paid to go there. I’ve never taken time off. I’ve never felt the need to take time off from my life. I wouldn’t even know what to do.
If I’m even more honest, my weekends don’t really exist either. I could be typing this article any day of the week, I do it when I feel inspired to. Could easily be a Sunday.
It was kind of shameful to admit, but I feel like I’ve been on vacation for 25 years. I do what I want, when I want, and the work I generally engage in doesn’t seem like work at all (writing this article is fun for me, that’s why I’ve written over 100). The “work” part of my day is usually under an hour. Those of you who have had connect calls with me – well, I only schedule one of those a day.
I don’t measure work in time, but in things accomplished.
One of my group pointed out that that should be the goal, to be more like me.
I shared with them one of my tricks – I say “No” to almost everything.
Every day I’m invited to participate in some sort of activity, training, offer, business opportunity, whatever. Even my usage of social media would be included in this – I don’t use it, so that is a big “No”.
Now, every time I say “No” it comes with a cost. But I realized, “I’m ok with that”. I acknowledge that I’m missing out on something – and that’s ok. It’s like the opposite of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), I’ll call it “COMO” – Comfort Of Missing Out.
Because every time I say yes, I give up something extremely valuable to me – my time. And not just my time, but unstructured time. Time where I can do anything I want at a moment’s notice. This article I’m writing right now, I didn’t need to write it. I already had an article ready to go out this week, but then I was inspired to write this one and I have the time to do it, so here it is.
And the only reason I have time to do it is because I say “No” to everything that would have taken this time away from me.
For me, I just won’t live any other way.
