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EP 9: The Paradox of Free Time

“What am I even doing? All I wanted was free time and I’m not even enjoying it.” On today’s episode of Getting Organized for Good, host Corinne Morahan addresses an unexpected problem she encountered after getting organized: an abundance of free time that she had no idea what to do with. At first she filled it with busy work before realizing that was just another form of clutter. To keep from turning our hard-earned and well-deserved free time from becoming just another form of stress, Corinne invites us to pause and figure out what we truly want.

Staying busy allows us to stay in control of our time. It helps us avoid the thoughts, actions and people we don’t want to deal with. But the whole point of organizing, Corinne reminds us, is to live our best lives, filled with the activities and adventures that bring us joy.

If you had a whole day to yourself how would you fill it? Corinne shares a few of the joys she fills her Saturday mornings with, bringing a little of her old city life to her home in the suburbs.

Quotes

“I started to ask myself, ‘What am I avoiding? Why do I feel this constant need to be busy? Am I trying to avoid myself? Am I trying to avoid the silence? Am I trying to avoid figuring out a hobby? Am I trying to avoid life?’” (2:58 | Corinne Morahan)
“There is a piece of us that keeps us in this story and this cycle of manufactured busyness because if and when we have more time, we don’t actually know what to do with it.” (5:05 | Corinne Morahan)
“Somehow we feel like if we’re not busy then we’re not going to be in control of our time, we’re going to have to say yes to things we don’t want to do, we are going to have to somehow be perfect.” (6:21 | Corinne Morahan)
“We spend so much of our time thinking about what everyone else needs and what everyone else wants and so little time thinking about what we actually want. And what is so crazy is I’ve seen even this phenomenon create another shame spiral. ‘How can I not know what I want to do with my free time?’ And then this just becomes another thing to stress about. That we fill our time stressing about how we don’t know how to fill our time. Oh, boy. Why do we do this to ourselves?” (7:32 | Corinne Morahan)
“I’m not saying wave a magic wand and everything changes, although I do think getting organized is the start of waving that magic wand.” (14:34 | Corinne Morahan)