I give myself a hard time about the things I do and getting the most out of my short time in this mortal coil. I obsess over things like social media usage, writing practices and lots more I don’t write about. It does get me down some times, but here’s the thing, I am confident I put thought into the right things.

Sure, I might occasionally spend too much time comparing writing apps or to-do tasks but, in the main, the things I put thought into are important. As Oliver Burkeman points out in great detail, our life on in this pace is limited to about 4,000 weeks. If it takes me time and a bit of mental energy to decide I want to avoid looking at social media as often as my chimp brain wants to. For me, that’s good time spent. Deciding what I am happy with and is correct going forward.

I think it is critical to think about the things you do if they are to make a large impact. Obsessing over details that will save time, money, energy are the best things to worry about. Spending time worrying about what blogging platform to use, or what reading app gets your money is arguably a different thing all together, but we’ve all been there.

Only you personally know whether these things are important to you or not. The unfortunate thing is that you only really find out what’s significant from experience. I hate to think of the amount of time I’ve wasted tweaking CSS or building themes for my blog that didn’t really matter — but I enjoyed every moment. I learnt things, and broke things, and I picked up skills in the process.

Any other person on the planet though would probably class that as wasted time. They would look at me weirdly that I spent a good few weeks thinking hard about social media usage, when they don’t give it a second thought. What I think is important is unique to me. I would view my tinkering completely differently if I wanted to be a real writer. Perhaps I should have spent it sitting in the chair and learning the craft.

They do say that perfection is the enemy of progress. At some point you do have to stop worrying about the how’s and the why’s and get going. Doing the things you set out to do and sticking to it. If that’s the case, you’re not thinking about important things any longer. You need to start moving forward instead of getting in your own way.