Recently I spent an entire day watching Smallville. I’ve also been reading fantasy novels or watching TV shows a bunch. Two things came from this entire lack of productivity. I distracted myself from all the stress I’ve been dealing with lately because of my mother being in the hospital. I also wasted a TON of time. I had lazy muscles and butt sores from sitting all day.
In order to put a stop to all this time wasting and self destructive behavior I finally created myself a schedule for each day.
Time Period |
Work Activities |
8am to 10am |
Answer emails, tweet, read blogs, comment on blogs, find new blogs... |
10am to 12pm |
Programming study with MIT OpenCourseWare |
12pm to 1:30pm |
Post daily blog, write blogs, edit existing blogs... |
1:30pm to 3:30pm |
Brainstorming new game ideas, more tweeting, any HTML/CSS work |
3:30pm to 6pm |
Graphic art projects, photo work as needed; programming as side option |
6pm to 7pm |
Review daily todo list, tweet, anything else needing finalizing |
Still allowing for some flexibility with each day, this schedule has greatly increased my productivity. In order to make me more interested in waking up early each morning, I’ve put my favorite item of the day on first. My day is planned out based on my brain/productivity levels. You can see that in the following table below.
Time Period |
Brain/Productivity Levels |
8am to 10am |
Medium speed, low to medium focus, partial fog-brain |
10am to 12pm |
High speed, high focus |
12pm to 1:30pm |
High speed, medium to low focus |
1:30pm to 3:30pm |
Medium speed, low focus, sometimes high focus depending |
3:30pm to 6pm |
Low speed, medium to high focus, high creativity as mind wanders |
6pm to 7pm |
Medium speed, medium to low focus |
This is the first time I’ve ever created a productivity level assessment of my own brain. I don’t think I ever would have been able to truly make that assessment, without being self-employed. There are always variations to my daily schedule. Such things include pushing a starting time forward 20 minutes, but the baseline schedule stays the same. And it’s working.