are you making the most of incidental me-time?

Are you making the most of 'incidental me-time?'

The photo to the right is of me with my one-year-old son.  He was showing me a single autumn leaf, out of about a million leaves available to show me in Hampstead Heath (a gorgeous piece of English parkland used as the setting for various films, including Notting Hill).

Rather whisk him up and carry him away, or say ‘let’s go!’ (or not let him out of the pram in the first place), I crouched down and investigated the leaf until he lost interest – which was possibly thirty seconds later. 

Truth be told, this was not as long as I estimated that it would take to stop and ‘smell the roses’.

WorkLifeBliss aside, I am not the kind of mother about whom people say, ‘she always calls a halt to her busy life to investigate leaves in detail if she feels like it...’ I spend a lot of time with my kids, but much of it is occupied doing practical stuff: helping with homework, driving them to extra activities, supporting them on the sidelines, doing their washing.  

I have strong bursts of work over seven days that equate to roughly a full-time load, interspersed with waves of relaxation. I love doing both.  

If I don’t slow down, it’s tempting to use the excuse, ‘I don’t have time’ (kids, work...)   Except that isn’t true.  I do have time and I often use it for other things (Facebook, The Mentalist...)

Not long after the leaf encounter in the Heath, my daughters were sipping hot soup in a cafe, and my eleven-year-old – slurping her piping goulash - said, ‘Are we in a hurry, Mummy?’

Ah, no – not as such.  We are actually on holiday right now.

‘Oh, good!’ she said, ‘It’s just that we usually are...’

Yes. 

Striking a balance between work and personal life is one challenge, and it's something that I continually tweak in my own life, (see some of our online resources to help you do this). 

Organising the amount of time that you spend on work within the big picture of life is only half the battle. Making the most of that personal time is something people struggle with, for a whole lot of reasons:

• Can't say no
• People pleasing
• Perfectionism
• Doing it all because others don't do it 'properly'
• Accepting or seeking out additional responsibilities to 'look good' and provide a sense of significance
• Disorganisation/scattiness
• Keeping busy to run away from the real problem

I had an email from a friend this week, who said she had made time to sit with her husband on the couch after work, sipping a cup of tea and talking.  She couldn’t remember when she last did that – loved it - but felt guilty about ‘wasting time’.

We can fall into a trap of thinking we don’t have ‘me time’ available, can’t fit in exercise, or that responsibilities take us away from the quality time with which we would love to enrich our lives, if only circumstances were more conducive - not realising the extent to which we create those circumstances ourselves.

How much of a slab of time would you need to restore that feeling of balance in your life?  An hour?  A whole afternoon?  A day?  A week? Those could seem fairly daunting blocks of time to carve out, particularly at this time of year. 

My little boy has reminded me that even a few seconds of being 100% focused on something different can go a long way.  Lots of little 'flashes of focus' on pleasurable things over the course of a day can transform your experience of life remarkably. 

Sharing something meaningful with a child, taking a proper lunch break at work, letting the sun soak in for ten minutes, walking around the block after dinner to look at Christmas lights, reading a chapter of a book before bed... none of these activities are delivered with neon lights blaring, 'THE ME-TIME STARTS NOW'.

Just as taking the stairs counts as exercise, though, we can reap benefits from ‘incidental me-time’ – stolen moments here and there that make an otherwise ordinary day memorable.