In Which I Admit I Talk To Myself

It's all about spinning plates.

It is also, confusingly enough, about knowing when to stop spinning plates.

I'm a quitter by nature. It's a part of my character I've grown to dislike, which in turn has given me a dislike of quitting – which sounds great and all, but I know from experience that it's very easy to become overwhelmed. Our circumstances and responsibilities are constantly changing, and unless you're able to make that call and drop the less important or relevant responsibilities, you'll soon end up with more plates in the air than you can handle.

How do you make that call, though? I mean, sometimes activities and hobbies are important precisely because they're not important – that is, we have to have our down-time. We have to have a little time in the day when we can put it all aside, and just do something for the pleasure of it.

    Otherwise you pay out the nose for a bathroom re-fit and someone
ends up frozen to death in a hugely-elaborate hedge maze. 

Other times you will have to be callous and calculating, put sentiment to one side, and really weigh the value of the things you spend your time on. Habits are, by their nature, things we do without thinking, but it is important to take stock occasionally - to ask yourself if you're still getting from your routine whatever it is you used to get that made it habit-forming in the first place, to ask if the money spent and time invested could be put to better use in the future.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I'll be restructuring The Grown-Up Game once again. I've been in two minds over this, as it's not so long ago that I tried shaking things up the first time. Am I giving up too early? I thought; perhaps I need to stick it out.

But if it's not working, it's not working, I'd respond, and I don't think it is. It shouldn't make too much of a difference on your end – it's really more internal stuff: developing a clearer structure; greater breadth of content; articulating my aims; that sort of jazz. Regardless, consider yourselves warned.

Until next week!