"Balanced" Does Not Mean "Perfect" | Artful Balance

Balance regarding productivity is planning my time so that my level of activity, discipline, and production is high enough that when i have moments for rest, relaxation, or entertainment, I feel thankful yet also look forward to resuming my work.

This contrasts feeling agitated, restless, or disturbed, wondering whether anything I do is leading to something I personally consider worthwhile (self-doubt).

It also contrasts getting burned out through compulsively overworking myself.

Self-regulating regarding productivity is the ability to continually strike a balance between exercise and entertainment, creation and consuming through sensitivity to what each moment calls for. Self-regulating people find productivity to be more or less automatic and require little-to-no rigid discipline to achieve it at a satisfying capacity.

(Short of possessing self-regulation, we can always set up an environment of inevitability to help ourselves along, which is what structured discipline is about.)

Whether or not I'm able to self-regulate well (I'm not), productivity must be achieved in a sustainable manner. Enter: balance.

Right now for me, balance means being productive from 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m., 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and again from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Four months ago in January, when I first began adding disciplined structure to my life, balance was watching one ten-minute video on philosophy per day.

Some day, I think balance will be spending half my waking hours or more engaged in invigorating, engrossing activity, and having grown into that capacity, it will feel natural.

"Balanced" does not mean "perfect;" that's why they're two different words.

The needle can always be moved forward as my capacity for growth grows. It's not worth pushing myself to extremes (self-doubt and burn out), which expose me the risk of depression.

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Artful Balance © 2019

These are my personal writings curated from material produced during my structured daily writing times as well as spontaneous thoughts I manage to record. Through organizing and uploading them i hope to learn about who I am as a voice and writer and find ways to improve my writing skills. Though I feel drawn to more cerebral topics, I would like my writing to be an engaging emotional journey none the less.

Someday I hope I figure out a way to assemble my short works into something more coherent and with a more obvious purpose. But right now, these tidbits are the best I can do.