I’ve decided to live life in reverse for a while. Instead of focusing on what I can bring into my life, I’m going to focus on letting go. A process I call subtract and thrive.
It’s an idea that has been floating around my mind for a while, especially after listening to Cait Flanders talk about her Year of Less. An experiment that resulted in her discovering and prioritising what she truly valued in life.
Things came to a head this week. After finding myself stuck in a whirlwind of activity, I knew something had to give. I had too many things that I wanted to do, but not enough time to do them all.
So the time has come to create space for all of those wonderful thing that I want to do. To take stock and to subtract and thrive.
Letting go to create space
As I currently see it, this isn’t about physical decluttering, or at least not to start with. It’s about re-assessing my values and how I spend my time within this new life I’ve created.
It didn’t hit me until the other day quite how much my life has transformed in just four months:
- I’ve become a regular blogger and launched myself into everything that’s part of the blogosphere – social media management, meeting wonderful new people, learning about SEO and the other technical stuff that is involved with running a blog.
- I attended the Pop Up Business School which opened my mind to the possibility of running my own business and being my own boss.
- I’ve launched Chicken Roulette Press where I create and publish my own journals, notebooks and diaries.
- I’m working on the ‘shh…it’s a secret’ side business with my fiancee… I’ll reveal more in a future blog post, but the way it came about was such an incredible moment of synchronicity that I suspect you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
- I’m currently part of a Mastermind group working with Jennifer Kempson aka mamafurfur.
Phew! I feel tired just writing it all down.
So it’s pretty fair to say that I’ve brought a lot into my life in the past four months. However, while new things have come in, not a lot of old stuff has gone out. So my time has been a little bit stretched.
I feel like now is the perfect time to subtract and thrive, to focus on letting go of the old so that all of these new things have space to breathe.
Social media mismanagement
If you’ve read my post on how to Design Your Future, you may recall that I mentioned the Moment app which tracks your screen-time. Well, I’ve been using it for a while now and the findings have been quite worrying…
183 hours and 57 minutes – that’s the amount of time of screen time I’ve racked up since the start of August. That’s almost 3 hours a day.
Considering that I’m only awake for about 16 of those hours, that means that almost 17% of my day is spent staring at a phone screen.
Admittedly, some of that time is me consciously choosing to use my phone to access social media accounts linked to my blog or the mastermind group. But I’d be lying if I said it was all linked to that.
I’ve noticed some patterns though. Early mornings or late evenings are hot-spots where I’m more at risk of becoming a victim of the endless scroll. There’s no reason for this other than boredom or habit. I’m not even particularly happy while I’m doing it.
Earlier this week I’d racked up 45 minutes of screen-time before 9am (I do get up at 5am but even still, that’s excessive)!
So this is one area that I’ll be looking to subtract and thrive. By letting go of excessive social media use, I hope to create more space within my day-to-day life.
An unfolding journey
While I have a starting point, I’m not quite sure of how my journey will unfold or what other things I’ll choose to let go of.
To help give it some direction, I plan on being mindful of how I’m spending my time and asking two key questions:
- Is it useful?
- Is it enjoyable?
This should give me a framework in which I can begin to identify what to subtract from my life and help me weed out old, outdated habits.
I’m very excited about creating more spaciousness within my life and looking forward to posting regular updates on my progress. I’ll still be around on social media, I’ll just be using it more intentionally.
In the meantime, it’s over to you. Let me know if the above post resonates with you and whether you’ve subtracted anything from your life recently. I’m sure I’m not the only one out there with this problem.
Image courtesy of Scott Webb on Unsplash