Sunday Productivity, Part 1
/The productivity systems I have in place are so convoluted that they would require a full book to explain them. And they’re so idiosyncratic that it would make no sense to ever write such a book. However, I wanted to give you one element of one of my systems that you might benefit from, but to do so I’ll have to lay some groundwork in this post. Then in a future post I’ll give you the details on the specific technique that has been very helpful to me.
Most people split up their day in this manner: work and home. Even if you work from home, you tend to think of things as work time and personal time. Broadly speaking, work time is spent doing things that make you money and personal time is spent doing things that don’t.
I split up my day slightly differently, into three parts:
“Work” time
Productive personal time
Unstructured personal time.
I’ll define the two outer categories first.
“Work Time”
“Work time” is anything that is mandatory for me that day. It’s not necessarily stuff I’m getting paid for, but it’s stuff that I’ve decided is non-negotiable. For me, the “mandatory” items that happen most days are:
actual work, i.e. a certain number of hours working on writing for this site and the related projects (books, newsletters); meeting up with people to test new concepts or effects; writing/consulting for other non-magic projects
exercise
listening to new music releases
any necessary errands
Now, obviously exercising and listening to music aren’t “work” in the sense that I’m not getting paid for them—I don’t teach a Zumba class—but they are things that are important enough to me that they fall into the mandatory “work” category.
Unstructured Personal Time
This is time where nothing is scheduled, and for which I have no set goals. I can do whatever I want during this time. I certainly can do something productive, if I’m really in the mood to. But the time is intended to be a period of relaxation. For me, this time is usually spent watching tv, hanging out with friends, or wasting time on the internet.
Productive Personal Time
This is the time I use for anything that isn’t mandatory (which is why it’s not in the “work” category), but it’s also not totally fruitless waffling. None of these things are particularly pressing, but they are things that I think are beneficial to me in some way, in the short or long-term.
The sorts of things that are in my productive personal time are:
Reading
magic books
magic magazines
fiction
non-fiction
comic books
Writing
novel
screenplay
Watching magic lectures/videos
Practicing magic
Cleaning
Various athletic activities
Various artistic activities
Learning/practicing musical instruments
Learning computer programs and computer programming
And probably a dozen or so other things. Things go on and off the list. If I think, “I’d like to learn how to decorate a cake,” then I throw cake decorating on the list until the point where I’m not interested in it anymore.
Some of those things on the list may ultimately be useful in my working life, but they’re not work itself at this time. They are not projects with a deadline.
The way I organize my day is that my “work” time just takes however long it takes. It might be two hours, it might be twelve. These are the mandatory things I do before moving on to personal time. ThenI’ll have a set time at the end of the day when my unstructured personal time kicks in. And I fill whatever time is between those chunks with productive personal time. (Of course this basic schedule doesn’t account for things like meals and socializing, but you just work those things in as they come up. This is the basic structure of my schedule, assuming nothing else comes up. But if someone calls me and says, “Hey, want to go see a movie?” I don’t have to work that in my schedule. I just say sure and go and then get back into my schedule when I return home.)
So if I get done with my work at 4pm, and I plan on shutting things down and going into unstructured personal time around 9pm. Then that five hours in-between will be filled with productive personal time.
Here’s why I think this is beneficial. If you just have two categories—work time and personal time—then where does learning a second language, restoring a classic car, learning to code, writing a novel, yoga, or practicing tomahawk marksmanship fall? Assuming those things aren’t related to your job, then they fall in the personal time bucket along with masturbating, watching Netflix, eating fudge, napping, peeping in windows, getting drunk, crying, etc. So then you have to rely on your own motivation to ever do something productive in your personal time. But if you create separate times in your day for productive and unproductive personal time, then you only need to be committed to keeping to the basic schedule you set out for yourself.
The hard part can be deciding what to do within your productive personal time. How do you make the most of that time and not just revert to whatever the easiest or most fun thing on your list is? Well, I have a solution for that. And in Part 2 of this post (coming in a couple weeks), I will tell you the automated system I use to guide my productive personal time in the most efficient way possible.