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".