In Control of My Day

One of the hardest things that I’ve learned in the past year is that I am responsible for choosing how I spend my time. That sounds really obvious, but take a second and think about it.

People simply aren’t socialized to make their own time/priority decisions. Until age 6 my activities were determined by my mom. From 6-18 they were determined by the public education apparatus of Baltimore County. 18-22: class schedule, 22 to 27: boss. OK, true, there’s some degree of freedom involved and it increases over time, but there’s always a box there.

My role at Squarespace was such that I could take on basically whatever I wanted to do (assuming I could justify it), and as such the only real limitation was my own time and creativity. There really was no box.

At first, this freedom was almost paralyzing. I didn’t know how to take such a wide open playing field and purposefully break it down, prioritize it, and take actions. It took me a good four months to finally grok that no one was going to set my priorities for me and to feel empowered enough to begin doing what needed to be done.

This experience—operating with no box—was transformative for me personally. I’ve definitely discovered a new sense of purposefulness in my day-to-day existence. Things don’t happen to me, I choose them.