Well, it’s nearing the end of my first full week with my time management experiment. In lieu of writing about music today, I’ll just make some quick remarks on the title of this post, or why it was sort of day 7.

On Friday, and through the weekend, I wasn’t feeling too well, and then I had a performance last night, which threw me off even further. I’m back on track as of today, but there’s a couple of lessonsI learned about what things in my schedule are important, and what things can give.

Above all else, my sleep schedule is important. If I fall off my schedule, but still get to bed on time, I can recover quite easily. If I miss my bedtime, and start shifting later and later, or simply don’t get enough sleep, then I begin waking up late, miss more of my schedule, and pretty soon, it’s next to impossible to recover. The success or failure of this experiment, and, indeed, everything in my waking life, depends on getting enough sleep, and getting it regularly.

The other most critical thing is exercise. While it is important for physical fitness, it’s even more important for mental and emotional well-being. Getting a good 30-60 minutes of exercise sets the tone for my whole day, helps me work hard and be productive and do everything I should get done, and go to sleep satisfied with my day. Then, I can rest well, get up early, and start a new day out with my exercise routine.

Music is also pretty essential, as it’s both fun and productive. Sitting in front of my piano keyboard for 45 minutes means that I never have to feel bad about an hour spent in front of my computer keyboard. It also fulfills much of my artistic drive, which is strong enough that  I would be doing something artistic even if it wasn’t scheduled, and, indeed, I still often do artistic things with my free time.

Work is, of course, important, for reasons I shouldn’t need to explain, and it’s been easier to do well, and quite a bit more fulfilling when everything else is in its correct place. I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Getting regular sleep and exercise helps me be productive at work, and that feeling of satisfaction carries through the rest of my day and lets me rest easy at the end of it.

Everything else besides these things is important, but not so critical as to be inflexible. If I don’t have time to shave one morning, or fix a quick meal instead of a full one, or miss out on half an hour of cleaning, as long as these things don’t get dropped regularly, then what does it matter? I don’t want to be wasting this time, but if I need to move things around, then that’s perfectly okay. I find that I’m just as happy and just as productive either way.

P.S. I know some people are reading this, but not leaving comments. I’d appreciate any comments or questions you have, both so I know you’re reading this, and because it will help keep my motivation up for what I consider the most important experiment of my life.

Well, it’s my third full day of my new schedule. So far, it’s going very well, and I’m quickly learning where I can relax the schedule a little bit to give me some flexibility. I think I’ll save the details of that for its own post.

I have noticed a couple of interesting things, though. First of all, it’s very easy for me to motivate myself to do certain things. I feel like exercising because it’s on my schedule, and it’s now my routine. When I don’t feel like cleaning, well, I’ve committed to doing it, so I’m going to anyway, and I get to reward myself with some free time later.

Secondly, my free time, for perhaps the first time since before college or even earlier, is really and truly free. Except for the incredibly lucky (or the incredibly unproductive), we all have things on our minds when we have downtime. There’s seldom nothing to do. Even if all the bills are paid, the house is spotless, and you’ve cooked for the next two weeks, maybe you feel like you should work out, or practice your instrument more, or whatever other obligations you have. With my schedule, I don’t have to think about those things during my free time. Since I have time allotted to worrying about those things, I don’t have to think about them at any other point.

Having time to myself with no worries is quite the luxury, and despite having a little less of it, the quality of the time is so exceedingly above what I am used to, even if I am just sitting around doing nothing, that it doesn’t matter that there’s a bit less of it.

On to today’s topic: work. I’m not going to go into any detail about my work schedule or what I do all day. As far as my personal schedule is concerned, work is an 8-hour block, with no details necessary. What is important, though, is regularly working 8 hours, and working the same 8 hours every workday.

Like I mentioned before, I now work from 8:30 to 4:30. Going in that early gives me an extremely productive start to the day, and I get to go home before the day starts dragging too much. It means I actually have more useful time to do the other things I need to.

Keeping a regular work schedule also makes it a lot harder for people to ask me to stay late. If I work 9 to 5 one day, 11 to 7 the next, and 10 to 6 the day after that, then what’s stopping someone from asking me to stay until 7 to do something for them? With such an irregular schedule, it’s next to impossible to set expectations for working hours. But, when I leave every day at 4:30, my coworkers know this, and they won’t ask me to change my schedule unless it’s critical.

That’s it for today. Next time, I’ll be talking about perhaps the most important topic to me: Music.

Hello all!

Today was my first day with my new schedule, which was a good idea, since Tuesday is generally my easiest day of the week, schedulewise. Considering I got to bed about twenty minutes late last night, it went pretty well. I slept in for about five or ten minutes, but then managed to get in most of my hour-long workout this morning. I was at work by 8:40, and had a productive day, ending at 4:30, as planned.

I shifted things around a bit in the evening to make room for a run to the store, and cooked a quick dinner instead of a full one. This answers one of my big questions: how flexible is my schedule? Tomorrow, it gets tested again, as I have a meeting until 5. Instead of going home after work, I plan on eating at my local coffeeshop, where I have to swing by anyway, to make up the half hour.

Now for the slightly more interesting stuff. I’ve decided that with each update, I would elaborate a bit on one of the seven main focuses of my schedule. Tonight: sleep, the most important component of any balanced schedule.

A normal adult has a sleep cycle of anywhere from about 90 minutes to 110 minutes. Sleep is by far most effective when it’s done in whole sleep cycles. This is because you sleep very lightly between cycles, and will tend to wake up with little or no stimulation. If you try to wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle, you will be drowsy, and even a bit disoriented, and you just might carry this through the whole day with you.

I know from experience that my sleep cycle is just around 90 minutes. It’s pretty easy to figure out your sleep cycle based on how long after you fall asleep you naturally wake up. For example, I can take sleep for 90 minutes, 3 hours, 4 and a half hours, 6 hours, and so on, and wake up easily from it. If I try to wake up after 5 hours of sleep, I tend to feel awful.

In addition to knowing how long a sleep cycle is, it’s important to know how much sleep you need. A normal adult needs about 7-9 hours of sleep. I generally think about getting 8  hours of sleep a night, as a good balance, but it’s important to synchronize to my sleep cycles. If I choose 5 sleep cycles, that’s 7 hours and 30 minutes, and 6 cycles is 9 hours. I’ve chosen 5, since it’s closest to my goal of 8 hours, and sleeping for 9 hours just feels like too much for me.

The last consideration when putting together my sleep schedule is when I will sleep. It’s best to keep a consistent sleep schedule, otherwise you tend to throw off your internal clock. I decided that I wanted to do my exercise in the mornings, which I’ll talk about in more detail later, and that I wanted to be into work pretty early, which I’ll also talk about in a later post. Getting to work at 8:30 seemed about right, and if I gave myself 30 minutes each for getting ready and driving to work, and an hour to exercise, that meant getting up at 6:30, and going to sleep at 11 pm to get in my 5 cycles a night. Perfect!

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how I spend my time. I always feel like I don’t have time to do all of the things that I should do, but then I spend quite a few hours each week sitting around and doing nothing productive. Clearly, there’s a problem here.

What I need is a way to take some of that under-utilized free time and use it to get important things done. What I need is time management. Now, there’s a plethora of time management systems out there, so which one to use? Or should I come up with one all of my own?

Like any good experiment, I decided to play to my strengths. I am good at following rigid rules and routines if I commit to them. For example, when I ran cross country in high school, I committed to running four days a week, every week, and not only when I was with the team. This kind of routine worked well for me, and while I certainly wasn’t the best on my team, I had drive, and I ended up being in the best shape of my life.

The method I decided on for time management is a very strict one, in line with my personal strengths. I spent about three hours last night scheduling, in half-hour increments, every minute of every day throughout my week.

This was inspired by my favorite movie, Stranger than Fiction. In it, the main character, Harold, has his life scheduled to the minute by his watch. Throughout the movie, he learns to loosen up and relax, to just live his life. If some people need to loosen up, then it makes sense that perhaps others (like me) need more regularity and routine in their lives.

There are a few things in my new schedule that are critical, and that served as the focus for my time. Here they are the top seven in order of the time I’ve dedicated to them.

1. Sleep: It’s important for anyone to get a decent night’s sleep. Many medical professionals recommend somewhere between 7 and 8 hours of sleep for adults. Because my sleep cycle is 90 minutes, I’ve scheduled  5 sleep cycles, or  7.5 hours a night, 52.5 hours a week, from 11 to 6:30 every night. This regularity helps me use the time asleep to its fullest extend, without the inefficiency that changing sleep schedules around can cause.
2. Work: I’ve scheduled work for 40 hours a week, 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM each weekday. Not too much, not too little.
3. Music: This is what my schedule really revolves around. 15.5 hours a week of rehearsals, lessons, and individual practice. 5 hours of this is dedicated to rehearsing with my ukulele band,  2 to choir rehearsal, 2.5 to practicing piano, 2 to each of practicing singing and guitar, 1 hour to piano lessons, and finally, 3 hours to taking in a local band every Friday night. I specifically scheduled time for music, as it’s something I’m very passionate about, and I want to incorporate into my life more.
4. Free TIme: Work hard, play hard. I scheduled 15.5 hours a week that I could do anything at all I want, in blocks from 30 minutes all the way to 5.5 hours. Since I’m getting everything done during other times in my schedule, I can sit around on the couch during this time for all I care.
5. Grooming: I’m of the opinion that one can never have too much time dedicated to hygeine and grooming. This isn’t something I particularly have trouble with, but I have 8 hours a week dedicated only to maintaining myself. This might sound like a lot, but most of it is half an hour every morning and evening, which includes bathing. On Saturday and Sunday, I leave an hour in the evening, which will allow me to tackle all of the bonus treatments, especially for my skin and hair.
6. Exercise: Along with music, this was one of my primary motivations for keeping a strict schedule. I will get 7 hours a week of exercise, an hour each and every day, from 6:30 AM to 7:30 AM, split among cardio, strength, and flexibility.
7. Cleaning: I’ve earmarked a full 2 hours each week for cleaning, spread out as best as I could with my schedule. This doesn’t include cleaning the kitchen when I cook, which I handle separately, so two hours can go a very long ways.

Today is day 0, meaning I’m starting following my strict schedule tomorrow. That means I have to get to bed on time tonight in order to wake up on time tomorrow to begin my morning exercises and still get in to work on time. In light of that, I’ll briefly go over a couple of challenges I will face, and then call it a night. I will be posting more rationale, schedule tweaks, as well as tricks I use to keep myself on task along with future status updates.

Challenges:

• What happens if something unexpected bumps my schedule off by, say, 15 minutes? I suppose I’ll have to have buffers built in at different points throughout the day that can absorb these kind of aberrations.
• What happens if a large unexpected event ruins my schedule for the day?
• What happens when a large expected event (like a concert) happens? Do I modify my schedule for the entire day to make it work?

That’s all for now. Wish me luck!