I was driving to a meeting today when I came to an odd realization. Often times we (or at least *I*) think about things in terms of "do I have time to do this, or do I have time to do that?" But it's really not about time--at least not for me. It's about attention. Or maybe focus?
I used to think that people who said "I don't have time to do that" were just trying to sound technical in saying they had no time. But the more I think about it, I think that at least some of them suffer from a lack of attention bandwidth, not time.
At least that's how I feel much of the time. It seems that the amount of stuff I can assimilate, accomplish, and otherwise occupy myself with in a productive way is limited by my ability to deal with it all, not hours in the day/week/month. For example, I often end up screwing around doing useless stuff when I have more pressing things to attend to.
And I've always had too many things that I wanted to get into. Lots of stuff interests me. It's been like this since college. But even if I had time, I just don't think I could do it all.