Scattered

I am in a position where I have 3 or 4 days each week with an incredible amount of downtime.  I also have a number of activities I'd like to complete.  Now these activities are of a more academic nature.  There are things I want to learn such as investing, system administration, and programming.  I also want to write about the things I've learned.  I've noticed (and people have pointed) out that I have a talent for technical writing.  In my communications with other people, I tend to write many paragraphs of text in a very methodical manner.

So, I have these things I want myself to learn and do, and I have the time to do it.  But what happens?  I find myself reading websites like reddit and commenting on people's facebook profiles.  I watch movies to while away the time.  Sometimes I will start reading up on a certain stock or an investment strategy, but after a while I veer off and go on to something else.  Other times, I will start looking at some pages about getting started in Python, but again I will veer off.  The end result is that I can go weeks without accomplishing anything new.

If I make a todo list, I will work on that todo list for that day.  However, I can't list everything on the todo list because once the list goes beyond something you can reasonably accomplish in one time period, it becomes a long-term plan.  Once it becomes a long-term plan, it falls to the wayside.  So, I've been thinking on this issue, and I've come up with a piece of the puzzle.  My focus is just too scattered to accomplish any of my goals.  Instead of making a todo list every once in a while when things pile up, I need to take my known downtime and make a schedule.   Assuming I have 10 hours available each of the 3 days, I can allocate a certain amount of time to each area I want to pursue.  The amount of time I allocated to each area can change over time, as long as I can maintain a habbit of allocating time each and every day (of downtime) to these pursuits.

My initial schedule contains two activities my friends know of, but I can't reveal to the world at large (client confidentiality and such).  I call these my "secret projects".

• 1hr = finance/investing research


• 1hr = studying for RHCE


• 2hr = studying and documenting certain aspects of system administration


• 1hr = working on secret project #1 (which also deals with system administration)   -- this is an ongoing project with no immediate end in site that I can see.


• 1hr = documenting secret project #2 -- this I hope to finish up within a few weeks of actually working on it.  Once this is complete, I hope to fill this slot with a programming concept I have in mind.

That would take care of 6 hours of my supposed 10 hours of downtime.  Downtime is also important to a well-balanced lifestyle.  I can take breaks between each task, or consolidate my breaks into watching a movie.  If I get really involved with any one task and run out of time for the others, that will still be more productive than spending 6 hours filling my time with 72 "5-minute activities".