So here's an oddly comforting/motivating/bleak thought:
I'm edging toward my fifth decade of life, and have been thinking about how to use what's left to me. We only get so much time on this earth, and when the clock runs out, how do we jibe what happened, what we did in that time, with what we wanted?
The calendar's ticking too.
For me, especially lately, it means refocusing how I use that time toward the things I want now, so I can't say later that that time was wasted doing what others wanted instead.
I have kept track of my studio time since 1998 or so, with a few gaps in record-keeping in the mid 2000s.
I've always thought of this in the way you might think of a FitBit - you can't improve what you don't measure, and clocking time gives me something to game, to better. Can I put more time in the studio this year than last year?
But increasingly time has come to mean something different to me. It's not how much I've banked, it's how much I have left to spend, and how not to squander it.
2017 is about this.