Thursday, December 18, 2008

How I spend my limited personal free time these days

It is always nice to have a reflection of our life every now and then. Usually, we do that because 1. we have time.
2. we need to (usually after something bad happened)

I think I'm doing that for the first reason.

My daily life is considered to be quite routine and should be 'boring' to many folks. I've white collar job with fixed office hours (+ voluntary/necessary OT). That takes up most of my waking hours. Besides the mandatory personal daily tasks, like brushing teeth, bathing, changing clothes, 3 meals, spending time to play with my kid a little bit and listening (more) / talking (less) to my wife also occupy a bit of time before bed. The only so-called personal free time that I had travelling back and forth from office, breaks during office hours and a bit of TV news watching time before bed. I don't know how others live, but I really cherish the limited personal time that I have each day.

First of all, I'm not complaining about the responsibilities and tasks that I need to take on outside my personal time, cos they are needed and I do enjoy some of them. I'm just saying that how to make the most of it from my limited personal time is very important to me and I'm trying to perfect my skill of squeezing every drop of it.

'Getting inform' is my hobby. So, my mind needs to be fed. That's why I like to read and listen. For reading, in view of the short span of personal time that I've, reading anything long is almost out of question. I've not read any novel for a long time. Even for books, I only read one or two books this year, and they are books in chapters with content that can be read and put down for a long time before picking up again without and problem. Therefore, I like reading articles from newspaper and the web. That's why I use my mobile to read newsfeeds everyday. Surfing web is a must. I love to be informed of what's going on in the world on different aspects.

'Watching' is another form of visual information gathering. Watching news is a must to be if possible. TV shows and movies are luxury, cos slots of my time are in 'half-hours' at most. I can push it to 45mins for an episode of Heroes, but movies take too much time. That's why I've not see a movie at home for long while. With my kid, going to cinema became a very infrequent event.

Listening is good too. Music is a passion. I still listen to music very often with my ipod. Definitely every week day on my way to and from work. However, I also divide those times, may be half or more on listening to podcasts. Thanks for these feature, I can listen to what I want any time. Yes, some of those podcasts are news, when I listen to them, they are old news. But, as long as I've not heard them before, they are news to me. Most important is that those news podcasts are more in depth then just regular TV news. So, to me those podcasts are more 'to-know-more' kind of cases. I try to listen to as many as possible, as I always get new episode every time I hook my Ipod up to my PC. I always have a backlog of them to be cleared.
As you can see how I spend my limited personal free time, you can pretty much tell, how busy I am and what would be my best gift. Da Da...an Iphone! That could help me to do most of the above. However, I'm still stuck with my old phone contract, so I don't think I will get my Iphone till next May or June. So, I just have to wait till then as I don't wanna pay any penalty for getting out of contract. Still, I'm still quite in touch with the features and news of Iphone, not just from reading those news websites about Iphone, but also playing with my wife's Iphone. Hopefully, by the time I buy an Iphone next year, the Iphone will be improved upon to meet more of my needs and desires.

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