The idea
Lately I’ve been struggling with my free time projects simply because I do not find time for them. I’ve become more lazy with the autumn that’s for sure, I always do, but work is taking a significant amount of time from my usual day. Sometimes it feels like work and sleep is everything I do, though looking at my time tracker at work would probably show arguably different data — I show up at work quite late - between 10 am and 11 am.
There are two days in a week when I have to stay at work till almost 9 pm because I have classes from 9 pm to 10 pm. I could of course shift my schedule to adjust to such times, which I did for a week or so, but I could not do anything “useful” after work - chores and sleep - that’s it. I mean staying up till 2 am is what I usually do, but I can tell now for sure that it is not the time to work. So the experiment I’ll be conducting is to do it the other way around - have my free time spent on my ideas early in the morning.
Time budgeting
I think I could fit gym workout in this experiment as well, after all, I have to take a break from all the coding otherwise it will start to bore me and I don’t want that happening.
So Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings will be spent in the gym. Initially I plan to wake up around 6:30, go to the gym and be at work (I mean starting real work and start tracking time) at 9:00. This leaves me free time in the evening from 19:00 that is more than enough for chores only.
Tuesday and Thursday mornings will be spent on my free time projects. The plan is to wake up at the same time every day so it would become sort of a habit to wake up early and get down to business. So this leaves me with at least 6 hours for my little personal projects a week. That is almost a full work day each week so I think it must be enough for the beginning.
I know that it will be hard to change the schedule for my body, but I’ll try to sneak power naps in the mid-day to restore productivity at work. Weekends will also have to be rescheduled, otherwise Mondays will become a nightmare. I think the easiest way would be to have a few rules:
- never stay up longer than 2:00 AM on weekends;
- wake up at least at 8:00 AM on weekends
- no PC after 10:00 PM;
- have an optional power nap (seriously, read about it) between 12 pm and 3 pm.
This should be like money budgeting - real easy. We’ll see though.
Expected outcome
Going to the gym is pretty obvious - getting in shape. With the other side of the experiment I expect to have a functional Wordpress theme for my blog until December 2013, and have full a theme for selling till Christmas.
Inspiration
I’ve got inspired to do this after reading several articles. Turns out that majority of successful people are early risers, probably because if you manage to get up at 5 am every single day, sticking to your (at least mine) other plans should be easy. Of course not everyone’s plans and practices are that easy, but I think that’s a part of pushing yourself forward.
I’ll post the results of this experiment later on.