Rescheduling the Days

Tiffany-Morrigan Henebury 768 words 4 minutes Scheduling Productivity

Productivity

I chanced upon the following video, and picked up a few lessons from it.

Deya's video on Productivity

It struck a chord with me, given I'm trying to better my time-management. I must caveat, I'm not a fan of "productivity" hacks; but I do want to improve my workflow. I want to be more efficient, to squeeze more zest of life, with less effort. Don't play hard; play smart.

Becoming a Concert Guitarist

I realized my dream of guitar musicianship, because it was the one thing that I did. For 8 years, I played a significant amount of guitar. At my peak during university, my schedule was 4 hours in the morning, break for lunch, 4 hours study, break for dinner, 4 hours guitar; sleep; repeat. Every fortnight, I would take one day off. Eventually I taught guitar, things changed, but I maintained the general principle of over working myself.

As a result, I became a concert guitarist. That was my one thing. It's my one thing no longer. I pick up a guitar, maybe once or twice every few months. I want to make a habit of it again, but I would need to make trade-offs. I could abandon my new one thing ( making video games ), and become a classical concert guitarist again; but I don't want that. Today I want to write songs. The trade off being, I would have to give up all the incredible fancy skills and delicate artistry that classical guitar provided me; at least for now. Doing so means, the goal of songwriting is attainable, without demanding of myself the intricacy, delicacy, and nuance I once trained for. It means giving up the lofty goal of transcendent performance, and accepting a few scrappy songs. Not easy for me, as I believe in life, and one of the few things in this world that exemplifies and thrusts life into people, is transcendent performance. To me it is more than a trade-off; it is a sacrifice - small as it may be in the grand scheme of life.

To Reach Goals, Set Reasonable Targets

For the last 18 months, I've been making video games. I would like to release the video games, but the first game, Mellow, is a long way off. It takes both significant breadth and depth of mutually exclusive skills to create a video game alone.

Since Dad died, I've been trying to branch out and do more with my time, including updating this blog.

Todays issue; I'm finding my initial schedule difficult to follow, although I did expect I wouldn't meet it; it was dreamily ambitious.

  1. Skim read a non-fiction book in the morning.
  2. Work on my video game, the one thing for ~4 hours
  3. Lunch
  4. Course learning ( Computer Science / AI / Medicine / Product Management ) note: yes, I am a fool
  5. Job Applications
  6. Video game - the one thing
  7. Miscellaneous Tech Projects - ratatui, C, etc
  8. Work on the Blog

Well, crumbs.

Accepting Trade-Offs

So I need to focus on my one thing; my video game. The first thing I need to work on in the mornings, is my video game.

If I want to squeeze in my non-fiction skim, I will need to do that elsewhere. I underestimated how much effort that takes; getting through an entire book in one or two sittings. I need to approach it differently, create a time plan of "chapter per x-minutes", and stick to it. I need to skim, consider how the introduction reaches the conclusion, and then after skimming, examine the similarities and differences between my expectation, and the passage.

And I need to reduce the learning; 4 sectors is just too much. One would be enough; perhaps I can fit two.

I need to remove or remodel the miscellaneous tech projects. Perhaps planning and designing them would be useful, and reduce the end-goal significantly.

Then, I might have time for this blog; but what to do with it? Some of it like the above, is merely personal rambling. Some of it is more... intentional. Can I alternate some of my blog with creative authorship?

  1. Work on my video game, the one-thing, ~4 hrs
  2. Lunch
  3. Course Learning ( Computer Science, Medicine ) alternating with Job Application and non-fiction skim
  4. Video Games, the one-thing
  5. Work on the Blog, alternating with Creative Writing

It still seems too much, but it's somewhat reduced. It's ambitious, but I'll give it a week. It will be simpler when I don't have job applications to make.