Have you ever wished you had more time to do everything you want to do in a day?

I thought about that as I was reading a stack of literary grant applications on my iPad in the park.  Here I am, in a beautiful place, doing my reading way before the panel meeting for once, and using my brand new shiny toy, the iPad to do it all.  Every so often I would skim my favorite blogs, jot down a few ideas for my own writing, find a recipe, read the New York times, check out traffic and weather, and visit a gardening website for tips on growing a fig tree, one of my latest projects.  I think I must have done a dozen things while I was sitting there.

Yes, the experience was powerful.  Access and information elegantly delivered.  And instantly.

I wanted more.

Now I need more apps to do more things.  Why stop after reading thirty plus applications?  I can annotate, link websites, score and rank them, too.  And check my email, upload photos to Flickr, write a product review etc.

Does this happen to you too?  Does technology create more stuff for you to do?

There will never be enough hours in the day for you to do everything you want to do once you get seduced by everything you could do.  What you want to do dissipates into “wow, that would be a cool thing to do.”

The best thing I did for myself was to put down my iPad, pick up my gardening gloves and spend the rest of my afternoon working in the garden with my friend Andrea.

Nothing could replace the simple satisfaction and sense of accomplishment I felt at the end of the day.  A day of doing one thing well – choosing to be fully present in one moment at a time, one plant at a time, one day at a time.

If you have a lot of things on your never ending to do list like I do, here’s a great gardening metaphor quote from Tom Peters:

Give a lot, expect a lot, and if you don’t get it, prune.
Tom Peters

My two cents:

Do less with more time.

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