20th of September, 2021
I'm very prone for procrastination. While I wouldn't say that I have focus
issues, I have noticed that I can easily spend hours on non-essential sites that
don't bring anything to my life. Social media has been one of them. I have
always had a pretty weird relationship with social media. I joined Facebook and
Instagram a long time ago because many of my friends and family were already
there. While I never did post stuff actively, I always noticed that I just ended
up mindlessly surfing these, especially on Instagram.
A couple of years back, I became conscious about this and decided to delete my
accounts on these platforms without giving too much thought about it. While
leaving these platforms were pretty easy for me, I noticed that I had just
replaced these with some other platform, YouTube in my case. After which, I
started spending countless hours on that platform instead. Back then, I didn't
consider this habit as bad as mindlessly browsing Instagram or Facebook despite
it being the same thing. I think I just rationalized it to myself being
educational or informative in a better way than other platforms.
Year or two passes without Instagram or Facebook completely fine, but then I
wanted to start using them again for some reason. Maybe I thought to myself that
I had already been cured of this disease so I could have a healthy relationship
with them from now on. I also had professional reasons behind this since I
thought that these platforms offer a great way of marketing your art to others,
which is true in some cases. However, very quickly, I started noticing similar
behaviour when I last was on these platforms. So after a couple of months of
trying to get back in, I just felt repulsed by them and decided to leave them
again. When it comes to marketing, that is not for me. I understand the benefits
of being an artist in social media. Still, since I mainly enjoy that as a
passionate hobby, I don't see the need for being on social media.
So at the time of writing this, I think it has been about six months or so of
living without these. Still, I'm very conscious about my unnecessarily large
usage of YouTube, News etc. While comparing my use with Instagram, I still
wouldn't consider watching YouTube or regularly checking news as bad as
mindlessly scrolling through your feeds. I still noticed similar behaviour on
those I struggled with, for example, with Instagram. I became conscious about
randomly picking up my phone and scrolling through news even though I had just
read them or just letting YouTube's autoplay roll for long periods without
giving too much thought about it. So I wanted to tackle these habits.
I have noticed that the most extreme methods work the best when fixing some
bad habit, at least in my case. So I didn't want to ease when trying to have a
healthy relationship with these applications but instead went cold turkey
immediately. Also, to help me in this, I wrote a simple application that
allows blocking distracting sites "completely".
So how has this worked for me? I think great! In the beginning, I noticed how
much free time I have when I don't spend it on useless things. Also, in the
beginning, I occasionally picked up my phone by instinct. I quickly realized
that I didn't have any applications to spend mindlessly surfing, so I quickly
grew out of this habit. First, I felt slight boredom when I couldn't spend time
on these apps, but thankfully I realized that this spare time needed to be used
elsewhere. Before this, I was already reading relatively a lot, about three to
four books per month, but I have almost doubled that number nowadays. I also
wrote about time management between multiple passions a while ago where I
pondered how I manage time between, for example, programming and music. After
ditching distractive sites entirely, I have felt that the time management
between these activities and my work life hasn't been an issue. It's
straightforward to find time for various pet projects and serious work outside
my work life since I don't spend my time on useless stuff anymore.
Do I see myself using these applications in the future? Well, I want to read the
news and continue to do so, not just constantly. I usually catch up with recent
events in the morning, but I don't desire to install any news apps on my
telephone. When it comes to these streaming platforms, YouTube, Netflix, etc., I
could live without them. There are lots of good information on these platforms,
so if I need to watch some video, I can allow myself to do so. However, I don't
want them to control my life in a way that I'm uncomfortable with.
10th of August, 2021
I have always enjoyed reading about other people's productivity hacks and their
workflows, in general, regarding whatever they might be doing. However, I often
stumble upon reading how people maintain an extravagant lifestyle with dozens of
different hobbies, interests, and passions with ease. So it makes me wonder how
they manage their time to maintain a healthy level of participation in their
interests without burning out.
I don't have dozens of different passions or interests in my life, but my
passions tend to be quite large on their own, so when combining those with 40
hour work week, I need to think about my time management thoroughly. These
passions I would consider to be writing, music and programming. Fortunately, I
currently work in the tech industry, so I can make a good living by doing one of
my passions. Writing on its own isn't necessarily a huge topic/interest, as it
only consumes time, but the practice itself is pretty straightforward. On the
other hand, music is time-consuming, and it involves many different activities
in my case. Sure, you could argue that writing includes other practices, too,
like planning what to write, but music is on another level. I play multiple
instruments, which I record for myself and others in my home studio. I enjoy
composing tunes, add some mixing and mastering to this, and you need to
sacrifice a lot of time for this. Programming is also something that I enjoy
spending my time on. While I do it for a living, what makes me truly like it are
the projects I work on in my free time, whether it's my pet projects of various
sizes or some open-source projects.
Finding the time and focusing on the task at hand isn't necessarily an issue on
its own for me, but it's more about maintaining a healthy balance between all
these passions that I hold dear to me. Although that being said, I would
consider being a very gifted procrastinator, so focusing on the task at hand can
often be difficult for me. However, focusing becomes no more an issue once I've
gotten into the flow. A more significant issue here is often finishing projects
rather than starting a new one (which I feel is entirely another issue to
improve).
When I work on my passions, I tend to focus for days or weeks on one passion,
e.g. programming, neglecting my other passions like writing and music. This on
its own isn't necessarily a bad thing since I don't feel that I'm wasting my
time when I'm doing something that I enjoy and something where I'm able to get
rewarded in multiple different ways. But I would like to maintain an equal
balance between my passions.
Tools to the rescue
A while ago, I started reading about how other people have managed their time
with multiple passions/hobbies, and almost unanimously, everybody used various
schedules for this. So I have already used a "life management" system for a long
time to handle all my to-do lists and schedules related to my home and work life
(insert praising words about Emacs' org-mode here).
I'm not going into details about how I manage my life with org-mode, but if
you're interested in the tool, I would recommend going through articles found at
Org for GTD and other Task management systems and from Rainer König's OrgMode
tutorial
I realise that I have been missing for a long time in my current setup because I
haven't scheduled when to work on what project. While I've split my free-time
projects into sub-tasks and occasionally schedule and deadline when to
work/finish those, the work has always been very sporadic on this front. The
result has often been that I work for an X period on one project then move on to
another, so I often just forget what I was supposed to do on the earlier
project. For me, this often leads to unnecessary postponing of tasks or
cancelling/removing them completely. I also quickly start saying, "I'll do it
tomorrow", which everyone knows won't happen.
Starting light
So I started to approach the whole concept of time management between multiple
different interests was to make dedicated timeslots and days for whatever I
might be working on. I maintain numerous ongoing projects that don't necessarily
have deadlines but are just larger projects that I want to work on from time to
time. Then these projects have sub-projects which are usually scheduled with
deadlines. These projects and sub-projects might include something related to
work, home, open-source work, recording or simply just writing something.
I nowadays approach working these by dedicating timeslots for something on a
specific day. My work life and day-to-day home stuff take a good portion of my
days, but I try to use it as efficiently as possible the rest of the time. So on
Monday, I might work on some programming related endeavours based on my backlog,
Tuesday something else and so on. The way I still approach tasks haven't been
changed in any way, as in I still manage my tasks and TODOs and keep track of
them, but nowadays, I just dedicate specific days for specific interest/passion.
Conclusion
This way, I don't feel that I'm neglecting the stuff I want to work on. Issues
with this kind of approach are the context switching almost daily. However, this
kind of switching isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't want to think about
work-related topics after I've "clocked in the hours", but I want to do
something either to relax or move my thoughts elsewhere. Issues that I've mainly
stumbled with are that when you might focus on programming one day, you focus on
music. While this switch on its own hasn't been too bad in my case, but when I
get back to, for example, programming after doing something else for several
days, it always takes a while to get back to the flow. But I do believe that
this is just missing practice in the world of managing multiple different
passions.
I have now split my time between multiple passions for several weeks, and this
is an excellent way to go. It has also taught me about the stuff that I
genuinely want to work with, since when you write down what you want to do and
when it's easy to spot the stuff that you don't want to work on or just don't
have an interest about it. So this also works in my case to find the topics that
genuinely interest me. Will I continue to manage my time like this for long?
Well hopefully. I feel that this way, I can contribute to all the stuff that
makes my life interesting, so obviously, I wouldn't want to miss that.