Christa, Day 3: Redesigning My Day

Today's Simple Living Manifesto prompt is about time management. Which I am both very, very good at and very, very bad at. I love to play around and procrastinate. The computer is very good for that. All the work I do is done on the computer... see where this is going? I love social media and connecting with people online. True story: I feel a lot popular online. And since I was always a geek in my youth, feeling popular as a grownup is AWESOME. (You like me, you really like me!)

Conclusion: The temptation to shirk off and mess around on Facebook is omnipresent. Yes, I knock items off my to-do list like a boss. Usually in between writing my own blogs and posting to Facebook and looking at design blogs and generally self promoting because what I do for a living bleeds into my personal life like bow howdy.

Today's idea:

Evaluate your time. How do you spend your day? What things do you do, from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep? Make a list, and evaluate whether they’re in line with your priorities. If not, eliminate the things that aren’t, and focus on what’s important. Redesign your day.

Now I did this, sort of, in pictures at my personal blog, I Know How Is Babby Formed. But that was more of a fun take on it, than anything else. It's a good start, I suppose, though not at all reflective of how my day actually plays out when it comes to work and play, since I'm at work right now but I'm jumping back and forth between thinking about this and prepping docs for later tasks. What I see when I evaluate my time is that here's a very fine line between work and play.

A moment-by-moment list? Impossible. Doing that would mean I wasn't doing this OR working! (Or maybe I'm just a lazybutt.)

What I can do is think about how I manage my time when it comes to both work and non-work activities. Like I said, on one hand I am proficient enough when it comes to time management that I can handle an almost full-time job, freelance work, keeping my house tidy, staying on top of household duties, etc. On the other hand, I am a rampant procrastinator who would rather be reading or clicking or cleaning or playing pretend with my toddler than working or doing responsible stuff. It's like work and chores? Yeah, I cram those in wherever I can.

Which isn't exactly a responsible grownup type attitude about or approach to life in general, for sure.

How could I improve my currently fractured time management technique? First off, more specific time blocking. Since scheduling tends to work wonders for my productivity - including both avocations and vocation - I definitely need to draw up a better daily schedule for myself. A schedule that includes both work and play. Yes, I schedule play (hobbies, slacking, etc.). All that means is that I actually do play versus many other do-aholics who never get the chance to play because they get focused on doing responsible stuff instead of fun stuff.

Sometimes "make peanut butter cupcakes" is a to-do list item, and that's okay. Pretty much everything I do contributes to one of my list items from Day 1.

After all that rambling, what am I taking away from today's Simple Living Manifesto list item? That I need to make some blocks of time that are just for this activity or for that activity so I can FOCUS. My problem is not time management so much as it is the management of my own brainspace. Instead of spending five minutes on this, then doing this for three before switching to some other task, I need to allot specific spans of time - 15 min., 30 min., whatever - to the tasks that should be considered priority to-do items. And I'm going to start as soon as I hit publish post. My guess is that it will greatly increase the quantity of work I get done today and also the amount of time I have left over for my favorite activity, just messing around.

P.S. - Go check out Amy's Day 3 at vegparadise!