Time management
Lately I've been really frustrated with myself over the issue of time management. I've never been very organized, and a habitual procrastinator. But this semester I've had an awesome schedule, only class two days a week, so that I could work the other three. Well, it turns out I played much more games than working, and time not spent on games was wasted Internet browsing. To quote Trace Adkins in "I Want to Feel Something": "Damn it all to hell I'm done, 'Cause I don't like what I've become..." Now, he said those words in regard to relationship issues, but that song (a favorite of mine for a while) kinda spurred me to realize I'm fed up with wasting so much time when there are people my age that spent free time coding and are millionaires now. Not that I just want money, but something to feel proud about. 8 straight hours of WoW, or Quake 4 (if you haven't played Q4... go get it, now) yields absolutely nothing, whereas 8 hours of coding would give me a site for Three Planets Software, which still needs one. So here are my resolutions:
The first problem was I had gotten onto a night schedule. This sucks if you have to have any intereaction with the real world, and I do. So, I've now got a routine of waking up at 9am on weekdays, even though I don't have to, and 10am on weekends. This is to give me a sense of schedule to any day, starting with getting in the habit of being up when the business day starts. Weekends I give myself an extra hour, but there's no excuse to stay up til 7am, and sleep until 4pm like I have been. Since that started, well, today I'm not quite up to waking up at 9 yet, but I'm already awake 3 hours earlier than I woulda been on a Monday last week.
Next, to tackle the issue of gaming too much. I really, really like the controls Blizzard offers for World of Warcraft accounts, specifically the parental controls. If you haven't seen it, here's an image.
Notice you can knock out any 30 minute window during the week. Also, if you drag and click you can easily select large blocks of time. To toggle a day on or off just click the day of the week. Some handy presets are available as well. The only thing its missing is an "invert" button to invert the times, but this isn't much of a lack, since they've provided good other controls. Anything red won't let someone login during that time. I'm assuming it'll also kick off an account that's logged in, but haven't tested.
The first thing I did was to knock out the times I have class. Tuesday/Thursday from 11-6 became blocked. My thinking is if I'm not in class, I might as well be studying, not gaming. This also removes my incentive for skipping. I then did the same for time I would be in church, as that's something that means a lot to me. Finally, I hit on the idea to knock out every work day from 9-5. The thought here is its my job to learn as much as I can, and if I'm not learning I might as well be working on programming something that'll earn money. SO, this essentially makes my WoW account treat me as if I have a full time job, which I really liked. The funny thing is, while this is only one game that I did it for, my brain is already thinking "Its not 5 yet, can't play games". I implemented it last Friday, and had an extremely productive day. So productive in fact, I had my old problem. I completely forgot that I could finally log into WoW, and just kept working 'til about 3am! It was great.
In addition to forcing myself to spend more time being productive, I've looked at ways to make myself more productive. A blog I was pointed at a few weeks ago, and have been reading faithfully since, is David Seah's. This guy is really great at design, and I've been taking some of his productivity ideas and charts in order to force myself to be more productive. Well, not force, but to increase productivity by following some rules. First off, actually, comes from Harkins, who suggested I make sure to reflect every night on what I'd done, and how it could have been more productive. This is a great thing, as it takes me about half an hour to fall asleep, and I can spend that time pondering ways to be better rather than just laying there and day dreaming. As for waking up, I took David's idea that one should set a base goal of three tasks a day. By the way, I should say that his forms are really amazing, and if you can use them, use them. Easy to use, nice to look at. But when I wake up, I pick three things to get done that day. Small such as "Make a post on how you're organizing your time" to large, such as "Knock out CS abomination of code today, or else".
This is all leading up to me taking my first contract as Three Planets Software either on Wednesday or a week from Wednesday. I felt I could only accept it in good concious if I was able to reorder my life to give myself the time to work on the website, and this weekend was my major test. It turns out, I can be DARN productive when I try, and am really pleased with the progress I've made. I'm hoping this'll lead to a better self-image as well, as if I on't think highly of myself, why should anyone else?
