Trying to save my time
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I've been thinking a lot lately about time. How
it keeps disappearing and how to save it.

I keep finding myself losing tons of time to so
many small things. I know this is partly
executive dysfunction but it's also about the
pandemic, about uncertainty, about the
degradation of a sense of time passing and
having meaning. It's also about our technology
and distraction.

I have the very classic problem of things like
notifications on my phone, my email, social
media, discord all just tugging on my sense of
attention. I've been noticing lately how much
effort it takes to actually hold in my head what
I'm trying to do when I open up my phone's
browser to look something up. It takes *active*
effort to even hold onto the search term I was
looking up or the name of who I needed to email
back.

I feel very cluttered, lately. I guess that's
another way of putting it. I feel cluttered and
like it's hard to hold onto my thoughts.

I was talking to my partner Tor about these
things recently and we were talking about how it
feels like time has started to lose meaning as
we're entering year three of the pandemic. When
you've been working from home for these last two
years on projects that don't have hard deadlines
everything starts to feel fuzzy.

I need more schedule and routine in ways that no
one can provide but myself.

I think one of the things I need to do is start
blocking out time for things like email or
social media, set aside time and train myself to
put it all down until those set times. Maybe
that will work, maybe it won't, but I'm just
getting frustrated with the ways it feels like
time keeps slipping away.