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Organizing Time

…if I could learn to listen to my own advice…

Organizing time - The time to organize

It’s interesting to realize how little time we spend organizing our lives.  I don’t mean trapper keepers and closet shelves.  I mean thinking about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re prioritizing.  It tends to be one foot in front of the other, not even knowing where we are, how we got there, or where we’re going next.  Every day feels like a fire drill, so there’s no time to stop and think about what to do.  Just move move move move move.

I’m seeing this with the undergraduate programming class I’m taking.  Some are doing well, some are doing poorly.  The ones who seem to be able to go from the latter category towards the former are the ones who stop to try to figure out how to change what they’re doing.  Inevitably, there are students who aren’t doing well and decide the best way to get themselves out of the rut is to keep doing wha they’re doing.

Donald Schön speaks a lot of being a “reflective practitioner.”  There “reflection-in-action,” thinking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it to do it better.  Then there’s “reflection-on-action,” thinking about what you did after the fact to understand how to do it better the next time.  This is generally applied to an actual job of some sort, but I’ve realized that it’s just as important to do these kinds of things with life in general.  What am I doing?  How did I do it?  What’s next?  The best place to start with this seems to be with thinking about the way you use time.

Organizing time - Reorganizing the way you use your time

Organizing time is like eating celery.  Celery has so few calories that eating it burns more calories it contains.  You lose weight eating it.  Organizing time does the same thing.  Yes, it takes a little time to figure out what to do when, but that pre-work will net a overall decrease in time being used.  So what does this entail?

I used to think that it meant taking every moment in life and scripting it into a schedule.  No minute used each day is unplanned.  The efficiency czar is working overtime.  But this is entirely unsustainable.  It’s really hard to figure out exactly how long things take.  I’m sure that over time I can become better and better at figuring this out, but it’ll always be inaccurate.  Then do I add buffer time to everything?

The other problem is that some things really matter and other things that don’t.  If I don’t get to vacuum today, that’s much less important than if I don’t get my reading done for class.  To schedule everything brings an emphasis of equity that is unnecessary.

So where does this bring me.  A professor of mine likes to talk about rocks.  Imagine filling a beaker with different sized rocks.  There are Big Rocks.  These are the biggest, most important parts of life - family, friends, community.  Then Medium Rocks, major responsibilities, such as work, school, etc.  Then Smaller Rocks, laundry, dishes.  Then there’s the sand.  Read a book, make sure the album art in my iTunes is cleaned up, organize my photos.  And lastly, there’s the water.  Rearrange the kitchen, find the perfect pen, YouTube and the rest of the interwebs.

Big & Medium needs to be set strictly.  I think it’s obvious that classes and work times need to be put in.  But I’ve realized that time with people also need to be put in, at least for me.  It’s so incredibly easy to neglect the people in my life because I’m “too busy”.  Yet, I know in my heart of hearts that this is really the biggest of rocks I have.  (Of course, different people will be different sized rocks, but you get the point.)

Small rocks don’t necessarily need to be strictly laid out, but might need some general placement.  “I’m going to do my dishes sometime tonight.  I’ll do my laundry on Friday.”

The interesting thing here is that the sand and the water always seems to find a place.  The problem is that the sand and the water often gets put in the beaker first.  It takes up all the space!  There is no longer time to deal with the more important rocks that are around.

At the end of all of this, it’s a matter of setting priorities.  If you think that playing video games is a large rock when it isn’t, all of a sudden, nothing else works.  I don’t know anybody out there who are pro VGers, so make sure it goes in the right place.

Now I gotta go and actually do this…

Fun Hats

…because hats are fun…

Jenny trying on some hats at target.  =)

I couldn’t resist

A Mass of Blogging

…I’m not including forums and other news sites…

I’ve realized that I’m hip deep in blogging.  I’m formally responsible for reading 7 blogs, contributing to 1, and commenting on 5.  I’m also trying to keep track for a half a dozen other blogs just for fun.  I want to start blogging again myself, both in general and for design in particular.  Yet, I’ve barely been anywhere on any of these.

I think part of the reason why I don’t blog as much as I’d like to is the grand topics for blogs I’ve been thinking about.  They’re deep and rich and nuanced.  But I’m not getting anywhere with that, so I’ve decided to move to short thoughts.  Sure, I may actually get in depth with some of these topics, but I’ll probably just try to go shorter with more regularity.  If you’ve been following, this is the start.  Hope to see you again soon!

Note: I’m mirroring this blog in a number of places
change02.wordpress.com
change02.blogger.com
xanga.com/change02
facebook pages

Feel free to read this at any of them.  If it gets too annoying, I may start dialing down to one or two sites, but we’ll see.