Current Rituals

12/11/14

So, I've been developing rituals and patterns working towards better general productivity. My day-to-day schedule has changed a lot since I last talked about daily things. I still focus on daily blog posts, but I gave up on the planning each week's worth.

Something I've been working on is using Google Calendars to track a sort of higher-level time-block. I'm not yet particularly great at following the plans I set up, but I'm getting fairly good at updating it during or after the fact. I find myself changing it multiple times per day. Today, I realized that I can schedule things in finer than half-hour chunks. I don't think I'll take advantage of that too often, but it'll be useful when I need it.

The calendar has been exceptionally helpful for me to explicitly set aside time for things I want to do. Specifically, I have to make time for blogging, node.js practice, and Japanese practice everyday. Seeing the open times around sleeping, cooking, travel, and work really helps me see how much time I have. I also realized early on, when I wasn't making time explicitly for specific productive tasks, that I wasted those precious blocks of time doing nothing.

I was not okay with that. I'm not okay with my current level of time-wasting. A tool that reminds me what I want to be doing now, and that I won't have time to do it later unless I sacrifice something else I want to do.

Another tool I find very helpful for motivation is another tool reminding me how much (or little) time I have. A simple countdown timer. Up until the start of this blogging session, I was using the Google Timer. The countdown timer I'm using now I prefer, because the timer gives its information in the tab title. Very useful. I'm still exploring options for sure, though.

So, what do I do everyday now?

• Walk the dog (~30 minutes)
• Blog post (~30 minutes)
• Node.js practice (~1 hour) (I've been slipping on this a bit)
• Japanese practice (~1 hour) (Not as consistent as I like)
• Cooking/Cleaning (~1 hour)

Things I no longer do everyday:

• Duolingo (German and Spanish)
• Weeding

I'd like to start adding things I do weekly, even monthly. The calendar system could totally accommodate that.

Weekly things include:

• Drawing
• Writing fiction
• In-depth article diving (a more serious blog-post)
• Some sort of themed goal

Monthly things include:

• Read a book
• Larger scale goal

Still lots of work to do on my system, for sure, but I'm running out of time. I'll make sure to have more blog posts on this in the future.