jan.varwig

(see here)

Well, it’s been more than a week but hey, nobody’s reading my blog at this time anyways.

Using the Day Planner has given some interesting results: Unfortunately, the system of planning your day ahead only works if you either know how much time you’ll need for each discrete task or you have big, continuous tasks that you can freely distribute over several days.
None of that applied to my work during the last 2 weeks but I still got some benefits out of using the planner:

You realize, how short a day really is

The sheet has 18 hours, from 6 to 23. I slept from 0 to 8 during the final phase of the preparations for my exam. I tried not to work past 23h, so that left my day with 15 hours. If you have these 15 hours visualised before you and you start filling them up with tasks, using realistic estimates for the time needed for each one, plan in a 1h break for lunch, you see how hard it actually is to get all those things done.

So, you begin to appreciate blocks of time as major slices of your productive part of the day that didn’t seem like much before and were therefore wasted more easily.

Fitting things in comes at a cost

That’s because I didn’t really realize how much time the small interruptions actually take. I would have estimated half an hour for a quick stop at the supermarket.
Well, double that and you’ve got the time it really takes to get the keys, leave the house, get the car, drive, etc. Ooops, there goes 1/14th of my work-day.