Gentle readers, I need your advice.

The biggest lesson I need to learn in life is that I can do anything I want but I can’t necessarily do everything I want. I have to choose and focus. That’s hard.

Actually, maybe I can do everything I want - just not all at once. Rose Kennedy apparently once said: “You can have it all, my dear, but you can not have it all at once. Life is a journey with many different adventures and each part of it is special. Sometimes you will have to focus on the task at hand.”

It still comes down to the same thing. I need to choose what to focus on right now.

I am doing a lot of things in my life, all of which I enjoy. Yet there is an opportunity cost with anything I choose to do and right now I don’t feel that I’m concentrating on the really important things.

Here are some of the things I’m doing right now:

• Working as a freelance journalist - balancing making a living, pitching for new and interesting work and trying to figure out how my strategy to survive and thrive in a changing industry.

• General life stuff, including trying to keep fit and healthy.

• Organising our wedding in April next year.

• Maintaining three blogs - this one, plus my food blog The Gooseberry Fool and my travel blog Roaming Tales.

• Volunteering two to three times a month at the British Museum.

• Trying to write a novel.

• Amateur theatre.

Once of my most important goals is to finish writing my novel. To be honest, I’m not really making great progress on this goal.

I’m wondering if there is anything I should give up in order to make the time for this. I’m loath to give up the theatre given that I really love doing it and also aspire to write plays in the future - though maybe trying to do the novel writing and acting at the same time is too much. The British Museum doesn’t take up much of my time and I’ve already cut back so I’m comfortable with that. I obviously can’t give up life, or wedding organisation, or work, even if I wanted to.

The area where I feel I can cut back is social media. As I mentioned, I have three main blogs, plus also the occasional dated update on my professional site or True Wild Catches and Century of Books. All of this takes time and it’s not just a matter of writing my own posts and forgetting about them - the fun comes in being part of a blogging community, interacting with other bloggers, micro-blogging on Twitter (where I am undoubtedly spending too much time), using tools like StumbleUpon and Digg.

All this stuff is a lot of fun but it takes up a lot of time. I find it very hard to do social media in moderation - it’s the kind of thing where you have to jump in feet first, and as my frequent Twitter updates show, it’s very addictive! And really, with my industry (media) changing so quickly and so profoundly, it’s essential that I keep abreast of it. If anything, I should be doing more, not less - it would be valuable for me to try podcasting and online video production, for example.

The problem with blogging, as novelist A.L. Kennedy points out, is that there’s no definable end. You can never say a blog is done and there’s always more you can do for it, whether in writing, site design or promotion. I’m beginning to feel that part of the answer for me might be to reduce my blogs. It’s very hard to put a blog to death though so the question would be how - should I consolidate everything under my real name or on this blog? Or should I merge my food and travel blogs in some way? Or just stop writing one of them?

The other thing I really like the idea of is the Secular Sabbath - one day a week where you don’t use the computer or a mobile phone. I find this really appealing - I love the internet but the truth is, my brain is sometimes filled with digital detritus. I don’t know if there’s been any research but I do wonder whether too much time online is just as stifling to creativity and deadening as watching too much television.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to best use my time? If you agree with my diagnosis, how should I rationalise my blogs?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 6th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Arts & Culture, Books, Career, Life, Media & Internet, Theatre, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.