Being Too Busy is Not an Excuse

For many of us, life is starting to get back to normal after a year of dealing with this pandemic. Work is starting to pick up, social functions are happening more and our calendar is starting to fill up once again.

We seem to have this natural habit to fill our lives with so many things to do that we don’t have a chance to sit down and relax sometimes.

Even though we find ourselves incredibly busy and sometimes it is unavoidable, we still need to focus on what should be the priorities in our lives; our physical, mental and spiritual health.

If we fail to take care of our body, soul and spirit, we won’t be able to do all the things we want to do very long before the busyness of our lives starts destroying us.

I personally have become very busy lately. I recently started working a second job and started helping teach a Bible study occasionally. This may impact how often I may be able to post my blogs, but don’t worry, I will not be stopping my blog anytime soon.

I thought I would share some of my thoughts on how to deal with staying healthy when life gets busy.

Change Happens

Change is unavoidable in life. Just when you think you have everything figured out, something happens and you have to start all over again.

For the last couple years things were going fairly smoothly for me. I had one job that was basically a 9-5 job. My evenings and weekends were free. I had time to establish a routine where I had time for reading, writing my blog and exercise.

I enjoyed the ability to accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish.

The only issue was my monthly bills were just as much as my paycheck and maybe a little more. I had some debt that was keeping me from being fully stress free.

I decided to apply the same focus to losing my debt like I did to losing weight. I knew I couldn’t do it overnight, but I knew over time, just like with losing weight I could do it.

To lose my debt, I needed the ability to pay it off. The first solution is to get a second job. There are other options I’m getting ready to do but having a second job is the quickest way to make more money at the moment.

I decided to use my weight loss to my advantage and created a resume and a cover letter that had a picture of my transformation on them. Then I went out to five gyms and handed them out. One of those gyms hired me right away.

That of course brought a lot of changes. I could no longer be certain that I could do my routine anymore. Some days I now work 12 to 13 hours, which leaves no time to exercise on those days.

Some nights I work until 11pm and have to be at my other job by 8:30 the next morning. The short night makes it difficult to get up early enough to read like I wanted to in the mornings.

So now my challenge is to figure out how to still accomplish the goals I have even though I have less time.

That brings me to my next point.

Time Management

My wife, Shirley, has been a big help to me in teaching me time management. Whenever I say I have a lot to do, she just says “time management”.

She is a busy woman who at one point was juggling three jobs. She has the desire to support her daughter and mother in the Philippines and that has always driven her to succeed in what she does.

Seeing how she handles so many different things, encouraged me to be able to do the same.

Though Life Changes, Priorities Should Not

We can’t help it when circumstances change in our life, but we should never allow the changes in our life stop us from doing the things that we should for our physical, mental and spiritual health.

We may have to rearrange how we do things, but never stop.

Too many times I have heard someone say, ‘I would like to be healthy, but I don’t have the time’. Others say, ‘I would like to eat healthy, but it takes too much effort.’

I use to say the same things. I learned to stop using the word ‘but’ in my sentences. Now I say, ‘I want to be healthy and this is how I am going to do it’.

Have Daily Goals

Generally we know how busy our day is going to be before we start. Take a few minutes and strategize what you can accomplish that day.

I have several lists of things I want to accomplish in a day. I partially have these lists to make sure I don’t forget to do something during a day. The other reason I set daily goals is so eventually I can reach bigger goals which I would never reach without the daily incremental goals.

Before when I just had the one job, I was getting pretty good at getting most if not all of my daily goals done.

It was very satisfying to see everything checked off of the list at the end of the day.

Now, it is rare for me to get everything done.

What I have to do these days is learn to be flexible. I look at my day ahead and at my list. On my real busy days I know I can’t get everything done.

I’ve learned that I don’t have to be rigid about my list. I get the things I know can be done accomplished and leave the rest for another day.

For example, I know that the next two days are going to be 12 hour work days so I’m not going to be able to exercise those two days. Instead of being upset about it, I accept it and make sure that the days like today and the day after my two 12 hour days I get a good workout done.

Give Yourself Time to Adjust

Just because you did something a certain way for a long time does not mean you have to always do it that way.

When things change in your life you have to learn how to adjust to those changes. Adjusting how you get your goals done does not happen overnight.

For the first couple weeks of working at the gym with the extra hours I was finding myself too tired to exercise on my days off from the gym.

I had to chuckle to myself that now I worked at a gym where I could workout for free and yet I had no time or energy to exercise there.

That was only temporary. Slowly I adjusted to the hours and now I have been having some fantastic workouts because the gym offers so many more options than my home gym.

I have even recently broken through a plateau I have been stuck at since the pandemic started and lost three more pounds with just four more to go.

I’m still working on adjusting to the changes in my life. One thing that the new job has affected is doing this blog. Last week was the first week since I started the blog that I missed posting.

Maybe I may have to consider slowing down and posting only once every other week. We will see. I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. I still have too many things I want to share.

Have a great week. Until next time.