Saturday, January 17, 2004

How Did I Ever Have Time to Work?
For my entire working career I watched people retire. Later, when I met up with the retired coworker, almost without exception these two things were true:

  1. They looked younger. The stress was gone from their face, they smiled more often, and they had more energy in their step.
  2. Sometime in the conversation they said, "I'm so busy I don't know how I had time to work."
I don't think I've relaxed enough to look younger yet, but "I'm so busy I don't know how I had time to work" certainly describes my days. It was obvious from the first day that I needed to plan my days just like when I was working. For years I've been thinking about all the things I was going to do after I retired. Now it's time to pick and choose out of that list - and add new things.

Keeping a weblog is a very recent addition to my list of things to do in retirement. Blogging requires consistent writing production and, in my case, the learning of many new technical skills.

Up to this point I've created Seasons of Violet by using a simple blogging tool Blogger, learning a few basic html tags, and borrowing code from other websites. I'm a programmer at heart, and I want to learn more, much more, so I've started taking the html class at W3 Schools.

Now we're back to the "I'm so busy" thread. I only managed to spend about a half hour on the class this week. I had good intentions and a moderate amount of desire, so what was the problem? I got sidetracked. Next week I plan to do better. The class is going on my daily todo list. I'm going to schedule it and we'll see how it goes from there.

If I don't spend time on the class next week, I can only assume I don't want to do it as much as I think I want to do it. Sometimes that happens.

What is something you want to do that you can't find time to do?