Where Do You Spend Your Time: Maintaining or Progressing?

Do you have enough time to do what you want to do for a day?

When I get asked, “How do you get better at calligraphy writing,” by aspiring calligraphers, one of the essential suggestions that I don’t forget to emphasize is, as you can expect, consistent practice.

Just like any skill, spending quality practicing time daily will make a difference in improving your calligraphy.

However, I understand that it's easier said than done. Even how much you love calligraphy, it’s not easy to make extra time every day for it with everything going on in your busy life.

Especially if you have a full-time job and raising kids, it's almost commendable if you can only maintain the time and energy to get by for a day.

7 years ago, when I decided to wake up early in the morning, I felt like it was the only way to carve out time for my calligraphy practice.

I was juggling my full-time job with kids. After coming home from work, there seemed to be another endless task to be taken care of until I drained all my energy.

Someone once said that there are two ways to spend your time in life: the things that are maintaining your life and the things that are progressing your life.

Before, when I was spending almost every hour only maintaining my life (at least it felt like I was), I remember it didn’t feel good about myself.

It was just that I felt like I wasn’t progressing. I was derailing from where I was supposed to be walking.

The experts suggest that a person should spend at least a minimum of 10 minutes of their time a day not just maintaining their life, but actively pursuing some sort of progress.

Things that maintain your life would be house chores that you have to complete such as cleaning and doing dishes, preparing meals, eating, sleeping, taking a shower and even doing social media.

Of course, if you are to get better at cooking or even planning to be a cook, then preparing a meal can be one of the efforts for progressing.

Or if you’re exercising merely to maintain health, that could also fall into maintaining effort rather than progressing.

One tip that you can take away from today would be to first set a goal that truly matters to you. Then spend a set amount of time regularly and daily to progress towards reaching the goal.

Picture yourself a year or two down the road as you finally reach that place you've been striving for.

To do that, you should be intentional about prioritizing your time and deleting or delegating some tasks you do to maintain your life.

I understand it won’t be easy but there’s always a way.

You will feel so much lighter about yourself and life when you sense the progress on the things that truly matter to you (whether it’s your relationship, passion or business).

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