"Wasted Time?"

(This is what the pic at the top of my blog started out as!)

I love making things... but I also love things to be perfect, at least in my opinion!  At times this is great.  When I want to make sure things are lined up, spacing is right, or colors match.  Other times, this can lead to lots and lots of hours wasted trying to create something that is exactly what I want.  Now I realize that creating something takes time.  Just about everything we see that was created by someone took way more hours than we could guess.  And sometimes all those hours create something even greater than was originally sought after.  

So why am I writing about this?  It's about the internal struggle that takes place for me.  You see... when I go to create something I am not always sure when to just stop and let it be.  I want to keep going and going until I am happy with what I have.  And yet, there are times that I look up and lots of time has ticked off the clock and I feel guilty.  I feel like it has been wasted time.  And then I wonder why I chose to spend all that time on one project. The hard balance in that for me is that I LOVE doing creative things.  I love getting lost in the creation and just going and going and seeing where I end up.  Take for instance my blog design.  I like changing it, I like playing with the pictures, I like thinking about all the different options... AND THERE ARE A LOT OF OPTIONS!  In the end, it was fun.  But am I OK if I am the only one that sees it and the only one that cares.  (Now I realize I just set myself up for insecurity because many of you may look at the blog and wonder what I was thinking anyway! But that is beside the point I am making here.) And the truth is, I'm sometimes OK when I spend time just playing and creating.  And other times I think there are probably more productive things I could have been doing.  

What are the answers?  I don't know.  I know there is a balance in here somewhere of not always having to be extremely productive on things that matter and of being sure that I am not wasting my life on things that don't matter.  So... wasted time? Sometimes!  But not ALWAYS!!

What do you like to "waste time" doing?