How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
It comes as little surprise that, as the dust finally settles on the past year, the new one begins to stir. What doldrums surrounded its arrival are now all but gone and a stiff wind hails from the past, pushing forward. It’s about to get really damn busy, is what I’m trying to say.
A couple of weeks into the new year and there’s a new contract on my plate. I’ve spent (hopefully) enough time considering the needs of it to get a proper deliverable schedule worked out with the client and have moved ahead with creating those deadlines. Which, if you recall, is a bigger deal for me this year than last. I’ve committed to not missing a single one of these deadlines. And I won’t.
To that point, I’ve also committed to, well, a lot more. I’m an ambitious human and I always think I don’t bite off as much as I do. Thankfully, I’ve realized what I did right off the jump so I have plenty of time to prepare, plan, and tweak as the year progresses. All that said, I’m here on the starting line and needing to make a choice on my first plan of attack. Scheduling versus blocking.
I’m very loose with my time. I don’t put much thought into when I do things or for how long, only that I know I have a certain set of things to do and I work on doing them. That’s all well and good under normal circumstances, but with everything on my plate I need a little more. And, this being the site that it is, I’m going to cover my thought process as I go through the decision making here. It’ll be on the fly, so bear with me.
I’ve set up a quick note of what constitutes my typical day. Seven hours of sleep, nine and a half out for work, and an hour of morning routine to get myself and the kids ready for the day. That leaves six and a half hours from which to pull value. In that time I need to write, exercise, take care of some things around the house, and actually be a husband/father. There are other things I’d like to do during those hours, but they’re secondary and I can revisit them after the fact.
Let’s take a look at scheduling, first. One of those hours comes pre-work and post-family. I can’t really manage a proper workout during that time because I become a literal embodiment of the ocean when I exercise and there won’t be enough time to get ready for work, so that’s off the table. That leaves house work and writing. I think the obvious choice here is writing – house work can be done with any kind of distraction going on and I can be spending time with people during it. Writing, not so much. Plus, with the slew of deadlines, writing is just more important and should take priority in the day. Easy enough, I’m marking that in. Down to five and a half hours.
I work out as soon as I get home, and I don’t really see that changing. I’ve been getting back to the house with a decent headache a lot lately, and exercising has eliminated it every time. I feel better after and it makes a great punctuation mark in the day, shifting my brain from the nine-to-five. No issue there. The problem comes from the amount of time this takes. I do forty-five minute programs, which isn’t bad, but like I said before it takes me forever to cool off and I find that’s all wasted time. I need to get something done there. Right now I think it’s safe to say it’s closer to an hour and a half that I spend around working out. Four left.
Two hours of that are split between dinner, spending time with the kids and the missus, and getting myself ready for bed. Of the two that remain, there’s a block of half an hour between dinner and kiddo time that would be perfect for house work. That leaves an hour and a half for whatever is necessary at the time. Likely writing, but it could be fluid.
Alright, I built a full on schedule while mapping that out. Every moment of the day has a task allocated to it. But… is that really something that’s feasible? I have a family, after all. Life happens: work needs overtime, the next sport season starts up, my youngest will start First Communion classes soon, etc. What good is a schedule, really, if you have to keep breaking it up and altering it based on the month, the week, or even the day?
That brings me to blocking time. Instead of requiring that hour between the kids going to school and me going to work as writing time, it’s just available time that I fill with the necessary task. Whatever task I pick, I record how much time I did and set upper and lower limits on the amount of each category per day. I kind of do this already, but only for writing and only how much time I did, not how much I should do or for any other task. How viable is that sort of thing to expand?
I do like this idea. It solves the “I actually have a life” problem that hard scheduling poses and, in theory, provides similar approaches. I’d still use that morning hour to write, for instance, but if there was something more pressing I’d use it for that thing. I see two fundamental issues with it, however. I’m prone to being listless, so the option to do something else is always going to prove tempting. Also, the idea of timing literally everything I do sounds horribly tedious. Effective, mind you, but I just don’t know if I want to be that guy. Counting calories is already enough of a pain in the ass. I know there are apps out there to make this easier, and I know that “what is measured is improved,” but something about this just seems… robotic.
Robotic or not, I think blocking might end up being the right call. I just can’t gel hard scheduling with my life right now, and while tracking everything will be aggravating, I can’t deny it gets the engineer in me cackling. On the plus side, I’ve already got my baseline times mapped out above. All that’s left is finding the right tracking app and committing.
Onward, friends.
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