so little time

As a fully employed father of two, free-time is definitely at a premium. Being an avid basketball definitely fan doesn't help. Being health-conscious and liking sleep makes personal projects damn near impossible.

Yet hear I am with constantly more projects than I care to admit. In an interesting piece in Macleans on the growing trend of out-sourcing so much of our lives in the constant pursuit to find time and reduce stress, one tangential point was about our current psychology

“There’s this sense that we aren’t doing enough, that there’s all this other stuff that we could be purchasing or learning that will make us better,” says Krull, who is also an associate dean at Queen’s. “It’s a brilliant marketing strategy. It plays on that feeling of inadequacy.” Hochschild takes it one step further: “We’re a self-improvement-oriented culture. But it’s gone from self-help to other-help.”

I think this identifies how I feel. I could be healthier, I could be doing more charitable work. Those stairs in the garage aren't good enough. More than being a motivator this breeds a sense of frustration. Things like watching the ball game or heaven-forbid a rerun brings feelings of guilt over procrastination. There's always a sense of frustration with time. I know I function better (physically and mentally) with sleep. However sleep is a very time-intensive project. It begins to feel that i'm already close to max efficiency (just a tad arrogant) that progress in one is at the detriment of another. Then again perhaps i'm just spreading myself too thin and not making measurable in anything

Any suggestions?