Life’s too busy – My solution

Until our daughter was born 15 months ago our life was busy socialising with friends, going places at weekends and staying away from home often. We thought “it’s been a fun life, but now a new chapter is starting and we won’t be doings the old things, we’ll have new things to do instead”. Well, we do have new things like new friends and new baby-related interests. Thing is, we haven’t stopped doing the old things, so life is even busier now. So busy in fact, that we’re very over-committed.

I’ve been discussing this over commitment with my Blanche (my wife) for months, and recently with George (my financial services business partner). George put it well, I’m Jack of all trades and master of none. This hit home. I’m a perfectionist by nature but I try to live by the motto “good is good enough”. With so many things I currently do, I’m not being ‘good’ at any of them.

So, I’ve given myself yet another new project; to reduce the number of things I do, and do the rest more thoroughly. I’ve made a good start. I’ve been actively avoiding new things online (like Google’s new browser, Chrome), I’ve unsubscribed from nearly a third of my podcasts and from many email newsletters, and will be ignoring some online forums that I’ve previously been active on. I’ve also finished one or two long projects and not replaced them with others. There’s still a long way to go, but I’m heading in the right direction.

So, to blogs. I’m not going to make any more post at my tech blog at http://www.CBits.vox.com (except to explain why). Instead I’ll be posting tech stuff here (hope you don’t mind). Not only does this halve the number of blogs I write, it also means I can cancel a project to move that blog off the horrible Vox platform.

Although I intend to post more regularly here, I’m probably going to concentrate on my own racing rather than F1 for a while. Maybe next season I will post Championship standings after each race to help me (and maybe you) keep track of the simple stuff, but for now I think I’ll resist the temptation to comment here on that’s happening on F1. I’ll keep my F1 comments (if any) short and to the point on http://www.twitter.com./ColinBowen. Don’t know what Twitter is? Watch this video here http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o, sign up, and add me ‘ColinBowen’.

No more F1 spoilers on twitter either. I had occasionally written commentary on F1 practice sessions, and comments on quali and races at http://www.twitter.com./ColinBowen. There is a platform (website) that is ideal for making such commentary (it’s designed for commentary on conferences), but I’m not doing new ‘stuff’ at the moment, so that will have to wait until some time in the future.