Blink and you might miss it. If you keep your nose buried in your job or in school, it'll fly right by you. What? Time. Like probably many of you last week, I was startled to find myself flipping the page of my calendar to July. Yes, it's July already. Where has the year gone?

It's not often that I'm jostled out of my contented state of "normalcy" to the point that I start questioning what I actually want to accomplish and how I choose to use my time, but it happened this past week. There are truthfully too many weeks where I find myself so looking forward to a weekend, a birthday, or a special event only to blink and find that it's disappeared from underneath my fingers, no matter how desperately I clench my fists to stop them from escaping. Then the cycle begins again and I'm counting down the days until the next weekend or circling a new date on my calendar to look forward to.

The many ironies of time are not lost on me. Although I find myself not wholly agreeing with the adage of "time flies when you're having fun." I think that time flies regardless of whatever you're doing or what you may have. Too often I come home after work or after class and I squander my time. I give into this idea of instant gratification. The thought that I somehow "earn" the right to sit around doing nothing after what I deem "a long day." At a conference I went to earlier this summer, I attended this discussion about time management and the topic of recording every single thing you did in a day (in 15 minute increments) came up. Want to be more conscious of how you spend your time? That is a definitely a solution, but I dread to think of how my daily schedule mapped out by every quarter-hour would look. It's easy to breeze through 10, 20, 30 minutes or even an hour on social media after getting trapped in the phenomenon of perpetual scrolling. Write that time down on paper, though, and I really start to feel pathetic. People perceive us by how use and like to use our time, after all.

If feels like just last week that I was packing up my stuff to move into a dorm in Omaha. That was three years ago. Ringing in the new year six months ago feels like it was just yesterday. As painfully slow as my three-hour summer class seems to crawl by in the afternoons, I'm now wrapping up on week two of the the three week course and it feels like the past weeks have breezed by. The idea that I've been so buried in class readings and assignments that I've barely noticed time around me is kind of frightening. But no matter how shocked I am or how horrifyingly fast time seems to pass, I know that it's only a matter of "time" before I lose myself into the lull of the mundane again. This kind of awareness won't last long before I end up right back to where I started spending hours on YouTube re-watching cat videos and always looking forward to the next weekend.

Tim Urban did a spectacular TedTalk titled "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator" which was a much more relatable talk than I had hoped it would be. During his presentation, he created and explained this unique concept of "Your Life in Weeks" which you can read all about at the link below:

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

However, this visualization of the boxes--these limited blank boxes of my life are mine to choose what to do with--is an empowering yet nerve-wracking concept. I want these boxes to tell the authentic story of who I am and the person I want to become. The procrastinator in me whispers that this could all be a reality for another day, but the ambitious fighter in me anxiously counts down the boxes and frets that I won't have time to do all that I could do. In the end, we are all limited by time. How many times have you wished that there were more hours in a day? Or hoped for an extra day in the weekend? I know that I have. It scares me that time could be the thing that holds me back. Time is seemingly never on my side and it's a common enemy for us all. The only way to fight back is to take it day by day and slowly check off the boxes one week at a time. I take comfort in knowing that we have the advantage of having the right to choose what we do with our time.

Before we know it, we'll be asking ourselves "Is it August already?"