My time vs. all the things I want to do in that time

I am feeling a lot of overwhelm and “too much” these weeks when it comes to my time and how I spend it.

For context:
I’m in TFC since this season – about a month now.
I study (which feels like a full-time job), my exams are in one month and to attend lectures & seminars I commute 3 times a week, 1,5h one way. This is new since this semester. The first two semesters I could stay in “home study office” most of the time due to the pandemic – that satisfied my needs a lot better than the commuting and my time being split to two cities.
I work 13 hours a week & at the moment I need that income to be able to pay my rent, food & so on.
Last year I moved in together with my partner & I switched from working to studying again. I decided that besides my studies I really wanted to have hobbies and enjoyable times. So I signed up for 3 dance classes in the new city – which ended up to be a lot more time consuming than I thought because we are preparing for a performance at the moment.
I’m a highly sensitive person and need more time alone than others and especially more time to just “process what I experienced” longer.

So since about two months I applied a lot from the Doing Less workshop:
– Doing some little relevant tasks every day, such as deciding right away about text messages (answering right away or leave it and don’t let it mean anything about me), deciding not to be available and leaving the mobile phone somewhere, planning a weekend on my own, answering people’s request of “Can we spend time together?” with “Thank you very much, but at the moment that’s not possible for me”, taking a study task and doing my best at not covering all the content (say it’s done and intentionally skipping parts because I can’t and don’t want to do it all perfectly), …
– Using a software that schedules events in my calendar for habits that I want to do (like planning the week, doing nothing, cleaning, time with my partner, intentionally texting others, post sth on the TFC wins thread, …), just as if I were making a reservation for myself. I liked the idea, I just don’t use it really. Anytime a “habit date” appears on my calendar, I basically say “no, I don’t have time for this, X is more urgent or important”.

To come closer to a conclusion:
I realized and decided that I want a lower baseline amount of activities for my life. But I still tend to say yes if someone comes up with a cool suggestion of how we could spend time together.
In the new city I don’t have many friends so far (more “acquaintainces” I would say). I can imagine this is why I don’t feel safe & this makes me say “Yes” more often because I don’t want to dissapoint people & my brain’s probably going “Go out with them, do things together, it’s not good to be alone!”.

So there are a lot of options what I could do to improve my situation:
1. Quit the dance classes to have more time in the evenings
2. Get more comfortable and used to saying no, exploring my thoughts & feelings around that and coaching myself
3. Either quit the scheduling software or commit to its suggestions more often
4. Do research about passive income or money mindset or another job or negotiate about my salary to not need to work as much as I do right now
5. Ask my parents about money again – which I don’t want to, I really wanted to be independent again.
6. Decide to do less of the studies and not take all the exams – which would mean I study longer probably (and I started with 25 which feels old for Bachelor programme – which is just a thought, I know 🙂 ).
7. Decide to stay at home instead of attending all the “in live” lectures – which would mean I’d miss out on lots of the contents relevant to the exams.
8. Move to the place where I study – which would mean I have to talk to my partner again and we’d maybe have to change to a long-distance relationship.

My question:
It’s all a bit too much for me at the moment. I feel like I don’t see the bigger picture.
Can you help me explore how I can approach the situation and make adaptions & decisions in a way that’s caring for myself?

Answer:

What if there were no wrong decision to make here? If you wouldn’t let yourself or anyone else down in your mind by making a shift or a reduction, what would you choose to embrace or let go of from your list? Follow your gut instinct here – what just feels right in your body? Make it simple. And then notice if and where there’s resistance and ask yourself, “Why?” Don’t judge…just let your body talk and listen to the feedback it’s giving you. When you go through this exercise, what comes up for you? Come back with a follow up submission titled, “My time pt. 2”.