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.

Day Planner

Procrastination is a Buzzword you hear from software and management people quite often these days. Just about everyone who has some freedom in timing his tasks seems to suffer from it. Students of course also fall under this category and I’ve had this problem since first grade.

Being a programmer, a CS student, an RSS addict and having a lot of time-intensive hobbies, keeping track of what I’m actually doing all day hasn’t become easier since school.

I’m aware of techniques like GTD, which seems to be all the rage right now but I’ve always considered it a bit too extreme for me. I also like to keep it simple, stupid to I’ve been looking for alternatives to suit my style of living and working better.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the Emergent Task Timer from David Seahs Printable CEO Series, which is a sheet to make you keep track of what you’re doing in the course of a day, helping you to discover patterns or problems in your schedule.

I liked the idea very much but it still didn’t really fit my needs. On the one hand, by the layout of the Sheet you are confined to a limited set of tasks, on the other hand, Seahs Sheet only has 12 hours whereas my day consists of up to 18 (6h-23h). Being wasted from sitting at the desk, staring at the screen all day, I went to bed shortly after 23h last night and turned on the TV for a while. Well, well, as chance would have it, I tuned right into a documentary about procrastination. Watching it, I got an idea about what my solution to the problem could be:

In order to keep me from getting distracted, I had to tightly plan my day, filling it up with tasks the night before and then following that plan strictly. I got up, set down on my desk and planned for today: Getting up, cleaning the hallway, work on the job, learn for EE, lunch, learning and being done at 16:30. I was sceptical how this would turn out, but today at 16:30 I really was done with everything.

For the purpose of not having to waste a fresh sheet of paper each day for my plan, I opened up OpenOffice and designed a timetable of my own, using what I had in the back of my mind from Seahs Table and came up with my Day Planner.

Put in a clear plastic folder and taped to my drawer, I can plan my days with a non-permanent marker, wipe and repeat every day. I’ll continue to use this for a week and report on my experiences then.

Download: