This is a continuation of the “ideal day” exercise from earlier.
What is my typical actual day? Alarm goes off at 6:00. Turn it off, sleep until 7:00-7:30.Stumble downstairs and immediately start on my daily review. Look over
tasks, calendar. Try to remember to do this BEFORE email.
Work through email, or take care of administrative tasks. If I
remember, process my physical inbox.
Look over Mint to make sure the expenses are properly categorized.
Often I get sidetracked into some organizational task, such as setting
up budgets or signing up for a service like AwayFind.
Or I may decide to bang out a blog post if I haven’t for a while.
Try to get started on contract work at 10AM, although I often find
dealing with email to overflows into this time.
I pretty much have all the unimportant mail auto-filtered into GMail
labels and OtherInbox at this point, so almost everything I see in my
inbox is something I actually want to deal with.
From 10/10:30 to 6PM-PM it’s contract work, with occasional breaks.
Typically I either work through the lunch hour or take care of some
chore or errand during that time, and wind up actually eating lunch
later on.
I get a lot done, but I still feel like I spend too much time on
reddit and sometimes twitter (although the latter is less of a time
sink). In general I feel like I could be doing more in less time.
7PM-10PM is disorganized family time. Typically I grab a beer and help
out with the kids, maybe take K & E outside so Stacey can focus on
dinner in peace.
Lately I’ve been pretty good about getting back to my office between 9
and 10PM and getting some more contract work in, or else working on
blog writing or podcast or personal projects. I often finish up with a
bit of reading.
I get to bed between 12:30 and 1:30 AM Honestly, it’s a lot like a somewhat less well-defined, more rushed
version of my “ideal day”. I’m not THAT far from the ideal. Notably
absent is any time for meditation or physical training. I’m also not
able to keep up with reading blogs the way I’d like to, I almost
always do less writing than I’d hoped, and I’ve been completely absent
from mailing lists. So what do I need to do to get from point A to point B? Getting up consistently at 6AM would help.
Maybe writing up my tasks the night before?
Almost certainly need to timebox email time.
Must get faster at writing. I guess there’s nothing else for it but to
keep practicing.
Delegation! Things like podcast postproduction take up way to much time. I don’t feel like I’m getting much out of this exercise. The truth is,
I’ve devoted so much time and thought to optimizing my work day, I
pretty much know what I need to do. The book is telling me to print out my ideal day on a card, and on the
other side have my list of things to do to get to that point on the
other side of the card. I dunno, I feel like this is all stuff I’ve
done already. I have an enormous plan.org file and I’m already well
into executing on a lot of my plans for a better lifestyle. At some point I need to go back and revisit the “ideal day” and
incorporate some genuine dreams into it, instead of just time
management. I think it may be time to move on and see what else this book has to offer.