Jansepar.com

Today, I came across a great arti­cle. It’s about how to focus:

http://thinksimplenow.com/happiness/power-of-focused-attention/

The main point of the arti­cle is that if you take on too many things at once, you will essen­tially fail. Maybe not fail at every aspect, but fail­ure in terms of how well you could have done if you did each indi­vid­ual task on its own, giv­ing it your full 100%. That got me think­ing, how much is too much for me, and am I past my break­ing point?

Lets find out.

I’m going to loosely fol­low the arti­cles advice and cre­ate a series of steps to define what I have on my plate, define the impor­tance, and go from there.

Life Areas

I think the author of the arti­cle sum­ma­rized them well, so I’m going to go with that, with one sub­sti­tu­tion: Edu­ca­tion, Busi­ness, Rela­tion­ships, and Health

Goals

Edu­ca­tion

This semes­ter at SFU, I’m tak­ing “four” courses, and I quote because I actu­ally only have three classes, but I’m tak­ing on a project that I con­sider a fourth class. I’m tak­ing com­puter net­work­ing (CMPT 371), which has its fair share of work with five assign­ments, two projects, a midterm and a final. I’m also tak­ing Numer­i­cal Analysys (MACM 316), which is a required course and is con­sid­ered the hard­est of the degree. And finally, I’m tak­ing Intro­duc­tion to Ital­ian (ITAL 100), which is going pretty damn fast, and my strong point is def­i­nitely not mem­o­riz­ing. I’ve actu­ally been con­tem­plat­ing if I should take it or not, but in the end, I fig­ured I always wanted to take Ital­ian, there are tons of peo­ple to help me, and if I do bad then I can just take it again when I come back from Europe (I’ll pick up some Ital­ian when I’m there, hope­fully). The project Hor­atiu and I are work­ing on is a website/iPhone/texting appli­ca­tion. I’m clas­si­fy­ing it as edu­ca­tional because we are con­sid­er­ing it a fourth course so we can actu­ally get it done before Europe. I’ll be talk­ing more about it when we are fur­ther into development.

Busi­ness

Hor­atiu and I also have this event called Mobile Mon­day where we talk about any­thing to do with Mobile tech­nol­ogy. This is a bi-weekly event, and we have pre­sen­ta­tions and dis­cus­sion, all over some free pizza! We use this as a chance to meet other stu­dents who are inter­ested in mobile tech­nol­ogy, and also to bring in some peo­ple from the indus­try to edu­cate myself and who­ever wants to attend. Now, as for how I make my money, I’m cur­rently work­ing at SFU in the audio visual depart­ment 21 hours a week to pay for my Europe trip, as well as insur­ance, food, alco­hol, etc.

Rela­tion­ships

I try to do the best I can in this depart­ment, although I can get ridicu­lously busy some­times. I gen­er­ally leave Friday/Saturday evenings free of any work/school. Usu­ally I’ll go out to the pub/club with my friends, and just do the typ­i­cal shit nineteen/twenty year olds do, like get­ting loaded. Fam­ily is pretty impor­tant, but it was a much big­ger thing when I was younger. My fam­ily just doesn’t seem to see each other as much, but its mostly due to the fact that all of the cousins are much older now, and in my fam­ily, when you hit six­teen there are no more fam­ily get togeth­ers for you (which means no more presents, but when you turn six­teen you’re old enough to get a job, which makes a bunch of cards con­tain­ing twenty dol­lar bills seem much more insignif­i­cant). In a cou­ple weeks from I’m going on a fish­ing trip with two of my uncles and two of my cousins, which should be a good time.

This year at SFU, I’ve decided to bring back the SFU Canucks Club. Hon­estly, there just isn’t enough fun shit at SFU, so I felt like I had to bring this back. And how can we NOT have a Canucks club? Its the ONLY pro­fes­sional sport in this city (well, I guess there is foot­ball, but I’m not going to lie, when the Lions won the cup, I really didn’t give a shit). Now, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t bring it back, but I’ve got­ten a lot of sup­port from a bunch of my friends, so I fig­ure it shouldn’t take too much of my time if I del­e­gate tasks properly.

Health

This is def­i­nitely going to be the cat­e­gory hurt the most due to how busy I’m going to be, I just know it. Over the sum­mer, since all I did was work I went to the gym quite a bit, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to squeeze much time at all for that this semes­ter. I’ve been play­ing ten­nis a lot more lately with Travis, and I hope to keep that up since I know he’s up for it any­time, same goes for my cousin. I’m also plan­ning on join­ing the Ten­nis club this year, and actu­ally go once and for all. I’ve also been want­ing to start going swim­ming, but just like the gym, where am I going to find the time? Plus there is the issue of hair, do I really want to spend another $70 to get my back waxed? If you’re read­ing this and you don’t know who I am, and are think­ing “what a tool, real men have hair”, well FYI, I’m Ital­ian and Iran­ian, so cut me some fuck­ing slack.

Do I have time?

So, this is the real ques­tion, do I have time for all this? Just to sum it up for every­one who has A.D.D., I have twenty-one hours of work a week, a full course load, Mobile Mon­day, Canucks Club, gym and ten­nis. And that doesn’t include the essen­tial stuff like sleep­ing, eat­ing, hockey pool, friends/family/women, canucks games, breath­ing, and of course, eat­ing (I eat a lot). I hon­estly feel like there is noth­ing that I need to cut out, but I’m sure that at some point, I’m going to be ridicu­lously over­whelmed. What does every­one think, should I cut some access fat? I can’t even really tell what part is fat, I feel like my life its more like a Big Mac then a T-Bone steak. The arti­cle talks about how focus­ing on one goal and doing really well at it is much bet­ter then hav­ing mul­ti­ple goals and doing a shit job on them all. But I don’t think there is any­thing I can cut out, and if any­one has a sug­ges­tion, I’m more then happy to hear it.