on Unemployment, Wedding Planning, and Time Management

For the past couple of years, while in my graduate school program, I was often overwhelmed with what little time I had to do all the things I needed to do.  There was always the "I have work and homework and studying to do" excuse for not doing some of the things that might need to be done, or that I might want to do, so it was easy to push aside low-priority projects and concentrate on the immediate (school related) ones.

After graduating, it seems as if I have all the time in the world to do what I want. Well, now that I'm not working or studying, I should have plenty of time to...

• find a job
• plan the wedding
• visit family
• catch up with friends
• volunteer
• run and get in shape
• learn/re-learn Chinese, Japanese, and/or Spanish
• blog more
• catch up on video games
• get to pro level in League of Legends
• draw and paint more
• catch up on sleep
• cook
• be sane

 Well... all of these take quite a bit of time, and it seems like, within a day, I haven't been able to do nearly as many of these as I like.  And now, there's really no excuse for why things wouldn't be done - after all, there's no need to study or do homework or write papers, I have all the time in the world, why can't I get things done?

Of course, there has been a lot of wedding-planning and (fruitless) job-finding, but none of the family-visiting, definitely very little (evidently) blogging.  I volunteer twice a week (soon to be once a week as the agency I volunteer for is getting their interns to work for the fall now), but I haven't been able to get into the habit of exercising everyday, so I'm not getting in shape.  And of course, trying to do all of these while staying at home almost all day every day (except for volunteering days) makes it hard to stay sane (well, that's what going out and running and exercising should be for, really).

I try and space my time out for wedding planning, but it's difficult when you have a particular plan for the day and someone decides to call and ruin your whole plan.  For example, today was supposed to be spent researching florists and setting up appointments with them.  But then, the sales manager from the hotel next to our wedding venue calls to give me the specs on booking a block of rooms with them.  So I feel the need to switch gears and check how many people will need accommodations as they'd be coming from out-of-town, and then of course, since I don't actually have a good number, I feel the need to work on Save The Dates so I can ask friends if they think they could make it or not and then, of course, the wedding website address needs to be on the Save The Dates so I feel the need to work on that, and at the end of the day (and this very run-on sentence), nothing really gets done at all.  Just one e-mail goes out saying, "I'll discuss this information with my fiancee and get back to in a couple of weeks."

All in all, it seems as if having time is just as overwhelming as not having it.