I’ve read about Chris Brogan’s Life Frame/Snapshot idea and now that I’m officially done with school, I felt I should try to schedule my time more. Oh lots of things to get done. In my attempts to do so I’ve failed to come up with any sort of solid improvement. Chris’s first step is obvious: observation. You take a snapshot of your current situation and recommend areas to yourself in which you can improve. So here’s my applcation of this method.
My Typical Day
5:50 – Wake up
6:40 – Leave for work
15:15 – Head home
Once I’m home, after some errands I may run, I spend little time with my family as it always seems I have something going on. Sometimes a quick nap will turn into a couple hours. Depressing. I have been using SlimTimer to keep track of various things I do on the computer: Reading Blogs, Blogging, Social, Emailing, Accounting (paying bills, budgeting). After a while it will be nice to look back at SlimTimer and see where I spend too much or too little time. After that, maybe some time for TV. Only maybe.
21:30 – Get ready for bed: phone, computer
23:00 – End up going to bed
So by the end of everything I feel I didn’t get that much done. I really haven’t had much quality time for my TiVo lately. I’m sure my quality programs are stacking up. I do try to keep with my todo list, but there’s got to be more than life to that. If you think about it, I have 6 hours from the time I get home to when I get ready for bed.
Observations/Possible Improvements
- Need to spend more time with my family, other than dinner. I tend to rush to my other things after dinner. Should set aside a good hour other than dinner with my family.
- The emailing category of my SlimTimer barely gets used. I need to keep in touch with some more friends. I should set aside 15 minutes each day to email someone I haven’t spoken to in a while, including important networking contacts.
- Set aside 30 to 60 minutes each day for TiVo. It’s really a nice way to relax after a long day of work.
- If I make an effort to go to bed earlier, I could get up earlier in the morning to either exercise, read some news, blog, watching some TV or even make a nicer breakfast for myself. This is a hard one. Do I really want to do that? There are feel-good benefits of getting an early start in the morning.
- I also have been wanting to do some more cooking, maybe preparing meals to take to work. That might take up an hour of a day.
- Finally, I could keep track of these goals manually in SlimTimer or a spreadsheet and make sure I’m following through.
The above changes only take up maybe a maximum of four hours out of the six I have right now. It’s hard not to get side tracked. The other two or so hours can be filled with blogging, reading blogs, educating myself, and accounting stuff. Chunking my time into 30 minute segments would help too. All this I will start tomorrow and see how well I do. I need to find more time out of the time I have. Having some sort of framework like this may give it back to me. This reminds me of an article I mentioned a while ago about How to Have a 36 Hour Day.
2 Comments
20 Aug 2006 at 07:57
Wow. This is a really great implementation of what I wrote. It’s neat to see. Do you feel like you’ve seen something from the process that might help you?
24 Aug 2006 at 17:09
[...] I did that with the snapshot method. Once you see where the shortfalls or holes are in your life/productivity, you can make a plan. My girlfriend kind of got that realization recently which prompted me to write more about this. “I really want to do things,” she said. “Experience life, travel, write a book about me, go help people, write music, be successful in the Christian music industry, etcetera.” She knows she has dreams and goals and that’s great. I was listening to some Disney park music this morning (and all the time), and the lyrics really holds true. We all have dreams and potential inside each of us and simply need to imagine and hope and our dreams can come true. This is not without work though. By observing our situation and seeing what we need to improve or change, we can make things much better. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed at Disney, the philosophy of dreams, imagination, and pixie dust making anything possible. I miss the times working there. My friends who worked there and had to leave agreed that when they got home things were just different. No magic. I loved being constantly surrounded with the never ending Disney philosophy: If you can dream it, you can do it. Sometimes I need to remind myself that no matter where I am I can still feel that way. As mentioned above, dreaming results from what you do to make your dreams come true. Dreams can even be goals. [...]