What Do I Want to Do Today?

A friend of mine recently created his own blog, and reading it reminded me how easy it is to know someone through only one layer of their life.

I can meet a person through a company, a class, or a project, and that context becomes the frame I place around them. Then they write something personal, and I remember that they have their own thoughts, hobbies, questions, and entire ways of interpreting the world.

There is an almost unlimited amount that a person can hold.

Reading his post made me want to document some of what has been occupying my own mind. The thought I kept returning to that morning, during my drive to work, was something I heard throughout my childhood:

“I have so many things to do and not enough time to do it.”

My dad used to mutter that to himself with a variety of emotions behind it. Some days it sounded like frustration. Other days it sounded like disappointment at the way work can inhibit us from doing what our hearts actually desire.

The common denominator was time passing. It sounded like a wish for some silver bullet that could make everything fit.

I was told when I was young that time is the most valuable resource in the world. I think I understood the sentence back then. I am only now beginning to understand the feeling behind it.

I have started seeing my own life in shades of the same pattern. There are so many things I am interested in and so many different ways I could spend one night. I could watch something, play a game, or spend time with friends and family. I could study, write, work out, learn about photography, work on a video, improve my company, move my research forward, think about interior design, or try to understand fashion.

None of those options are fake interests. I care about all of them in some capacity. That is what makes choosing difficult. Every time I choose one, I am also deciding not to spend that time on something else.

Meanwhile, time passes regardless.

Trying to engineer the problem

My first instinct was the obvious one. I am an engineer, so I tried to turn the problem into something I could engineer.

I created a Google Calendar with predefined blocks for different parts of my life. If each interest had a place, then maybe I could stop wondering whether I was neglecting something.

The issue is that life never fits as succinctly into a calendar as I expect it to. Work takes longer than planned. Rarely is it the inverse, where something finishes early and hands me an hour back. One block runs over, the next one moves, and suddenly the entire system is behind.

Trying to engineer every hour also sucks some of the soul out of it. It puts the rest of my life inside the same frame of thought that already governs most of my time: work.

I love to work, do not get me wrong. But where is the authenticity? Where is the part where I do something because I genuinely feel pulled toward it?

So, okay, what if I do the opposite?

What if I follow wherever my heart wants to go on a given night, obviously with some confines and discipline?

That feels more authentic in the moment, but it creates a different problem. My attention becomes dispersed. I forget some of the things I care about. The surface area of my interests shrinks to whatever happens to be easiest to remember. My ability to context-switch has also dwindled, so I do not move between different interests as naturally as I once did.

The calendar felt too rigid. Following the moment felt too forgetful.

I do not think the real question is how to multitask more effectively. The core issue is how to protect the authenticity of a desire without losing every responsibility around it.

What am I trying to protect?

I spend a lot of time wondering how people choose to experience life. I wonder what my dad dreams about. I wonder what other people dream about. Do they recursively question these things the way I do, or do they accept that we exist, we feel, we die, and that is that?

Maybe it really is that simple.

I do not mean that in a nihilistic way. Maybe I mean it in more of an existentialist way. Maybe we are all creating our own meaning, and the way we spend our time becomes part of that creation.

If I am being candid, I want to develop the skill to write coherently and beautifully enough that people will listen. I have never been artistic in the sense of paintings or drawings, but my art has always existed in my outlook and perspective, and in the videos and images I use to document my life.

My art is the documentation of existence.

That is part of why I am writing this. I am giving a thought some form of existence and recording where my mind is right now.

I am also trying to understand presence. Presence is not really a thought. Thought is usually retroactive, interpreting something I previously experienced, or predictive, imagining how I will feel in the next moment.

Presence is a feeling. It is the feeling of being immersed in whatever I am doing.

My assumption is that, when I am older, I will not remember every moment. I might remember the key, key details, but often what remains is the feeling a memory evokes. A wince. A smile. A laugh. A frown. A sigh.

The responsibilities are still real. Work, school, bills, friendship, love, and every other part of being human do not disappear because I want to feel present.

But if I only remember the responsibilities, I can forget that I wanted anything from the day at all.

The second list

When I wrote down what I needed to do that day, the list looked exactly how I would expect. Work. School. Errands. Responsibilities at home. Small pieces of maintenance that become important only after I keep putting them off.

It was a normal to-do list. Useful, actionable, and completely soulless.

Then I wrote a second question:

What do I want to do today?

Not what do I want to do instead of my responsibilities. What do I want to do within my needs, and what do I want to do outside of them?

That day, my answers included writing, creating a blog of my own, looking through the videos and photographs I already had, and trying to create one YouTube video from them.

The specific answers are not the system. They are going to change every day.

The second question is the system.

I already understand why I make to-do lists. Writing an obligation down makes it easier for me to act on. It moves the task out of my head and gives it a place to exist.

Why not give my wants that same opportunity?

For me, a wants list does not mean every interest needs to become another assignment. It is not a second productivity system. It is a reminder of what is available when a free moment appears, before my brain automatically reaches for whatever is easiest.

Maybe I remember that I wanted to research a video instead of scrolling through short ones. Maybe I remember the article I saved because I was genuinely curious about it. Maybe I remember that I wanted to take photographs, write, call someone, cook, or learn something for no external reason at all.

I think learning feels purest to me when curiosity is the only thing asking me to do it.

I still do not know how to engineer a perfect answer to how someone should spend a life. The calendar blocks will run over. The lists will change. Some nights, discipline will matter more. On other nights, the thing that makes me feel alive might be the more important thing to follow.

This system does not create more time. It does not resolve the feeling inside my dad’s sentence.

I still have so many things to do and not enough time to do them.

Maybe I only need a way to remember that both questions exist: