Random Talk : How the hell do I do it?

One of the biggest questions that I get is how I get the time to do all the things that I do, and as perplexing as it is for me to consider it a proper question, now that I think about, I do an absurd amount of content consumption in very short period of time. If I were to be honest, I would say that I have no idea how I do all that I do in a short amount of time, but since I am someone who enjoys a lot of research, at least when it comes to wasting time, I kept track of everything that I do I was surprised that I found a pattern.

I write about a lot of things in this small blog of mine, but there are so many things that I don’t write about too. What I will attempt to do with this post is to bring light to a few of those things and how I consume so much content in a short frame of time, without constantly being called out for wasting time.

Let’s start with how I consume all the music that I listen to. I have a weird habit of never having a constant playlist. There are a few things that I will always have on my phone, but ninety percent of the music that I listen to will be new music. I’ll download a new album, listen to it on my phone, and I will remove it from my phone. It is that simple. If you’re wondering where I listen to music, I can safely tell you that it is almost everywhere.

Music has always been something really close to me, and I make sure that it is close by at all times. I listen to music when I travel and I travel a lot. Around three and a half hours of my average day is spent in travel, mostly in buses, and music is a constant companion, unless I am travelling with someone else. There have been instances of me getting so into the music to the point where I miss my stop. But hey, I don’t really mind. I also listen to music when I just want to type a really long post. For example, I am listening to music as I type this. But this is not always the case, because for some post, I prefer to work in silence; a good example of this is the fact that I don’t listen to music when I write my reviews or my short stories. I also listen to music when I have nothing else to do, or if I am waiting for someone. I also listen to music when I am gaming, unless I am terribly involved in the story.

What this allows me to do is that, I get to listen to a constant stream of different genres of music and that lets me enjoy it all so much more. On the point of what is constant on my phone, I would say classical orchestral music, indie-alternative songs, a few rock songs and Taylor Swift. It’s a weird combinations but it is mine. And in case you are wondering if I listen to music when I am driving, the answer is a big No. And when I am surrounded by people or in a public space more precisely, I listen to music in one ear only.

With that out of the way, let’s move on to another thing that I do pretty regularly, but don’t share much about in my blog. I read stories almost every day. I prefer physical books to e-books, but recently I have also been getting into self published stories on Watt-pad and Fan-fiction. Yes, some of them are torrid, but some of them are even better than some of the novels that I have read. Since they are all online, I read it on my phone, when I travel. If it is a physical book, I will read it before I go to bed, or when I am using the toilet to do my business. I know that it is completely weird, but since we are being truthful, I do need to put it in here.

The people who know me know that I am an avid reader, and I am not going to dispute that fact. If I put my mind to it, I will power through it in under a day. One of my personal bests is finishing the complete Harry Potter in just 20 hours and 17 minutes. But the deal is that I have to put my mind to it. If I don’t, I can take a week to actually finish a book that I don’t want to read. So there is that. Since I am reading a lot of E books now-a-days, I cannot give you an average number of pages that I read in a week, but my guesstimate would be around six novels around 700 pages long. It should also be noted that I listen to music ninety percent of the time, unless it is a book I am really invested in. And I don’t know why, but I can never get into the whole fad of listening to audio books. I am sorry, but that’s just the fact. I have tried more once and they just don’t seem that appealing to me.

Let’s get on to the more time consuming things that I do; movies, TV Series, dramas and Anime. These probably take up the most time because, when I am watching something, all my attention has to be on it. I cannot do some other work when I watch a movie or anime. When it comes to new movies, which I catch in the theater, the problems of distraction is solved completely. But say I am watching an old movie on my computer and it is not as great as people said it was I just start doing some other work, be it writing assignments, working on articles and posts or just reading things while the movie runs in the background, until it gets to a part where it hooks me again. This wouldn’t be called correct analytical procedure, but I have always hated procedure, so to hell with it anyway.

Anime is a different beast altogether. If the series is thirteen episodes or less, I binge watch it within a span of four to five hours. That is the easiest thing to do, because it makes sure that I don’t have a backlog that I need to address later. If the series is twenty five or more episodes long I binge it in two or three days. This same applies for series. Ninety nine percent of the series that I watch will be completed because, it just saves me time. But if I am very much excited about the series, say Game of Thrones or Sherlock, I will wait for each episode to come out.

Apart from all this I also watch a lot of YouTube. It is my main source of news, both in terms international politics and just plain old entertainment news. I also watch a lot of statistical analyses in terms of social experiments and I am an avid follower of science channels and NASA. A large chunk of my music also comes from YouTube. When it comes to drama, I have it planned out, because the shows, much like movies, happen at a specific time, and so I get to plan ahead and allot time for it. This is also one reason that I can’t make it to some shows of dramas. It may be three or four shows before I see it for the first time.

Like i mentioned earlier, there are a lot of things I do that I don't talk much about. I know, at least to a certain extent, to fix laptops and smartphones. I am an avid artist. I know how to use Photoshop. I know to edit videos, in a variety of different programs. I may not know how to compose music, but i know how to record it and edit it. I am a techie; ask me about any phone and I will probably know a lit about it. This doesn't come without work and a source of knowledge. For me, it is all from the internet, so naturally a lot of time is spent on that. I have to read blogs, and forums and watch videos to know all of these things, because if I don't, then i can't say that I can do any of these things.

I know that it seems like I am wasting a lot of time. And if you actually think about it, I am. But it is all these things that allow me to know so much and be able to write a two thousand word article about something I have seen two years before off the top of my head. All of this is the reason why I can name movies off the top of my head and make stylistic connections between film-making and literature. This is the reason why I am, who I am. I am the eccentric guy who knows a lot about things which not many people care about, but that makes me who I am and not for one moment do I feel like I am wasting time.

After all this comes the time I spend to write. I have touched upon this earlier, but from starting to write up to publishing and sharing my post it is, on an average, an hour and a half’s work. If there is a bit of research involved or if I am doing something like the video I did, then it takes a bit longer. Coming to the point of when and where I write, I can’t find a pattern to it. I write whenever I want, as long as I have something that I want to write. For example part of this post was written before I went to bed last night. Another part of it was written when I had a free hour at college, and write now I am writing this part, sitting in a bus on my way home. As long as I am able to tune out my background noise, I can write anywhere I want to.

On weekdays, I have five hours of college; that and three hours of travel. On Tuesdays, I have to go to the offices of the magazine for which I am a correspondent. I have no colleges on the weekends but I do have French classes and Sanskrit classes from one to 7 in the weekends. Everything else that I do is fitted around this constant timetable. Recently, I started playing music for dramas for which my dad is the music director. It is my small but still substantial source of income.

Naturally, doing all this does mean that I have to make certain sacrifices. The largest one is, quite possibly, sleep. I know that most people will say that I need to get sleep and sleep deprivation isn’t good for health, but whatever anybody says I will end up ignoring it all because I want to finish a novel or a series, or even a post. Another important thing is that all these things are time intensive, and along with these I do have to do, what people will say, normal work. I have to study. Fortunately, I have taken English Literature, and to me there is no difference between reading a prescribed novel and one that I pick up. But languages are difficult and I have to do my homework when it comes to French and Sanskrit.

Out of twenty four hours the amount of sleep I get is, at the maximum, six. If I am burned out tough, I may make it to eight or nine. A small trick which I use to stay awake is caffeine and chewing gum. Make sure that your face is moving in some way, and you won’t sleep. Now, I am not saying that you can do what I do. Nobody can do it, because everyone differs. Never in a million years can I follow a schedule that someone else follows, even if they do all the same things that I do. Every single one of us is unique and that is why we are all so different. This schedule works for me, because I learnt to tailor it to suit the things that I do.

At the end of every day I ask myself two questions. One of them is if I made one person smile today. It can be anyone. A small kid who smiled because I did funny, or my apartment watch man smiled because I am one of the few people who asks him if he had his lunch. It doesn’t matter what I do, it just matters that, for that one moment I made someone happy. The other question that I ask myself is if I can properly justify every single decision that I made that day. If the answer is yes to both of them, that day has been a good one; at least to me.

I wrote this post to give you guys a small look at the things that I do regularly that define me as a person. Sure these may change over time, and on that day when none of these things define me, I will write a post that tells you what does. But something tells me, that change isn’t going to come anytime soon; if ever. Until next time;

Peace!!!