I feel like Arnold Rimmer with his study timetable.

I’m terrible at New Year’s resolutions, year-in-review posts, “theme word for the year”, or anything along those lines. My best resolution of all time, back in 2002 or 2003, was “eat better quality cheese”, and I’ll never hope to match it again. Still, things are a mess for me at present and something needs to change, and today, before the “work year” starts, seems like a good day to take stock.

I’m not going to make resolutions, because everyone knows they don’t stick (except the cheese one). What I’m trying to do is prompt myself to be a bit more thoughtful about my time and energy. So, today I spent a bit of time working through some questions like:

• How do I spend my time? How do I want to be spending it?
• How can I tell whether I’m spending my time the way I want to be?
• How can I be more thoughtful about each day?
• How can I avoid spinning my wheels?

I started with a spreadsheet entitled Why I have no time, which I’ve shared publicly. In it I broke down my work and non-work time in an “ideal” situation, noting how many hours a week I’d like to spend on various things. Of course the distinction between “work” and “non-work” is a bit blurred for someone who’s self-employed, does lots of voluntary stuff, and has personal interests that cross over with professional ones, but it’s a rough breakdown.

Then I updated Toggl, which I’ve been using for time tracking throughout 2014, so that my “Projects” matched the spreadsheet, in terms of general categorisation and colour coding. My Toggl Projects are:

• Paid contract work (split by client for convenience)
• Growstuff – development
• Growstuff – other
• Professional development/research
• Work email/catchups
• Work – writing/other projects
• Work – planning
• Work travel
• Business admin/paperwork
• Meals
• Life admin and domestic miscellanea
• Health
• Social events/activities
• Personal projects
• Personal blogging/writing
• Relaxation – crafts/tv/reading
• Internet/social media/chat

I know I’m reasonably good at using Toggl to track my time, so this will let me see whether my “ideal” matches reality or not. If not, then I’m going to have to reflect on whether the way I’m spending my time is in keeping with my goals and values, or not. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.

Finally, in an attempt to be more thoughtful about each day and avoid spinning my wheels, I’ve come up with a couple of worksheets to help myself. They are:

• The breakfast worksheet (one page, ~5 minutes) which I hope to fill in over breakfast each morning, to give a bit of shape to my day.
• The weekly worksheet (1 page, maybe 10-15 mins) which I hope to do on Sunday/Monday, to give shape to the week ahead.

On the back of the weekly worksheet is a checklist of achievements that I can check off throughout the week. My checklist’s pretty idiosyncratic, and I’ve given myself lots of easy ones to get the kick of checking them off easily — you’ll see that the first checkbox is for having filled in the front of the worksheet. The left column is for work stuff, and the right column for personal (but see the caveats above). Some of them are non-specific, like “work meeting” or “self care” or “left the house” and there are multiple checkboxes, so I can have a tick whenever I do something relevant and leave a note about the details if I want to.

I’ve revised the worksheets already, just an hour or so after I created them, and I expect I’ll keep adapting them as I use them. I’ll be interested to see which questions/prompts are most useful to me, and which ones I can usefully drop.

Please feel free to copy/re-use any of these ideas if you find them useful!

Syndicated 2015-01-04 00:41:44 from Infotropism