Something to Think About

I been thinking about how there's too much happening in my life, which is another way of saying that the things I consider important take up more time than I can comfortably spend working hard enough to be happy with the results. I have 3 kids half time; I own a business; I manage very high-liability projects on which many livelihoods depend; I have a very active intellectual curiosity that demands regular feeding; I have a bloody willful pit-bull; I do yoga, walk, and meditate; I grow my own vegetables; I have an old decrepit house that is basically Howl's Moving Castle with me as that hearthfire dude; I insist on cooking meals for all sorts of ethical, aesthetic, emotional, and social reasons; I have IRS problems; I have great, complicated friends with dramatic lives; I have a girlfriend who lives 4 hours away; I have at least 2 psychotic neighbors... So I went looking on the 'net for something about maybe how people do this, except, to be honest, if someone handed me a recipe for exactly how to take care of all this stuff I would be so bored by the topic that I would lose the paper. Anyway, one thing I found appeared to be one of those reductive lists found throughout the self-help literature. But it's been sorta gnawing at me, maybe because I hope it's not true and maybe because it is, or both. Basically, it says: to be successful you can pay attention to only two of the following four things: your work, your family, your health, and your friends. Is this true? I mean, without getting too wound up in parsing "success", is there really just enough human attention in any one person to take care of two big interests? Maybe some really intense people who don't need much sleep can do three? Golly, I'm thinking, do I really need to give up at least some of the people I love in order to succeed at work? Do I really need to give up my health if I want to keep my friends and family? I guess the idea is that each of these things requires time and there's only so much. Maybe I can consolidate a few items, like include my intellectual curiosity in my "work"? My cooking in my health? My friends in my family? Certainly there are many many men who abandon their families and health for success at work. Certainly many many women have seen that having children makes a dent in their careers. Anyway, just trying to get a handle on my busy-ness and this four-burnered stove of life thing caught my attention.