You Have 47 Goals and Zero Hours Left. Now What?

I tried to do everything this month. Here's what actually survived.

I’ve been trying to learn piano. I’ve been trying to eat better. I’ve been trying to hit the gym consistently, get my cardio in, read more books, and knock out every goal I set for the year. Oh, and I’m also a father with kids. No big deal.

Somewhere around week two of February, I hit a wall. Not a dramatic, life-crisis kind of wall. More like a quiet Tuesday afternoon where I sat down, looked at my to-do list, and realized I hadn’t checked off a single personal goal all week. Not one. Life was moving. Work was getting done. But everything I wanted to do for myself had been shoved to the bottom of the list for days.

That’s the trap, right? You tell yourself you’re going to do it all. Wake up, crush a workout, eat clean, practice piano for thirty minutes, read a chapter, then go build your empire. And on paper, it works. In reality, you run out of hours before you run out of ambition. The math just doesn’t math.

So I sat there and had a very adult conversation with myself about priorities. What actually matters most right now? What can wait? What am I doing because I genuinely want to, and what am I doing because I saw someone on the internet say I should? That last one hit a little harder than I expected.

Here’s what I landed on: you either accept that you can’t do everything, or you wake up earlier. I’m not joking. Those are the two options. Either cut something from the list or find more hours. And since science hasn’t figured out how to add hours to the day yet, that means the alarm clock is moving up.

I know that sounds like hustle culture nonsense, but I don’t think it is. It’s not about grinding harder. It’s about being honest with yourself about what you actually want. If piano matters to me, I have to make room for it. That room doesn’t magically appear. Something has to give, or I have to get up before the sun does. I chose the alarm clock. We’ll see how long that lasts.

The funny thing is, even gaming took a hit last week. I didn’t touch a controller for days. The one exception was Tuesday night. My brother and cousin wanted to play Relic Hunters Legends, which, if I’m being honest, isn’t really my kind of game. But I showed up anyway. Because Tuesday nights aren’t about the game. They’re about the night. It’s the one block of time I protect every week, and it doesn’t matter what we play. What matters is that we’re there.

We laughed, we died a lot in-game, and I logged off feeling lighter than I had all week. That’s the thing about gaming with friends. It recharges something that productivity never touches.

I still don’t have it figured out. My to-do list is still too long. My alarm is set earlier than I’d like. And I’m pretty sure I’ll burn out on the 5 AM thing within a month. But at least I’m being honest about the tension. You want to do everything. You can’t. And that’s okay. The goal isn’t to do it all. The goal is to keep choosing what matters most, even when that changes week to week.

Or just wake up earlier. Honestly, it might work.

What’s the one thing you keep pushing to the bottom of your list?