I think it would help me a lot if I got back into scheduling.
I recently got back from a vacation and I’m planning to put effort back into school (to go to law school and become a lawyer). I realized I haven’t scheduled myself in a while and think that would help with some of the stress that I have.
Stress related to things like: if I just focus on school will I play games, or do philosophy, or go hand out with friends, or go the gym, etc. I think because school seems like a task i need to take strictly(?) because of due dates and stuff (versus the self scheduling of tutoring) I’m scared(?) to just go about how I’ve been and just do things as I feel like.
To start off with I’m going to write schedules as I’ve always done in the past when I first tried. I think they were definitely overwhelming but I just want to start on something I know before trying to improve it.
I’ll share it after I’ve written one but how I scheduled before was to say what I’m doing *every hour * and then to check it off throughout the day. I hand wrote it and yeah.
Some things I remember struggling with:
not having enough energy to get through the huge list of tasks
bulking tasks that I thought were small and not having enough energy for them
getting caught up in something that either came up or finishing a different task and then giving up on the schedule for the rest of the day
along with that I think because I had constant issues later on when I would try to get back into it I would have issues remembering I even had a schedule and respecting it
I haven’t found a good solution to scheduling my time. I’m interested in the topic.
An idea I had was to start by keeping track of how I already use my time. That was an idea of Elliots for figuring out what your goals are, but I thought it’d work with scheduling too. That’s because I also applied that idea to personal budgeting with success, and a schedule is kinda like a budget for time. I failed a lot with budgeting because I was kind of arbitrarily allocating money to different categories and just trying to stick to my budget, but I realised I needed to start with what I actually do already spend. Once you have a budget that reflects your actual spending habits, you can think of different ways to live your life such that you can change your budget. The error I made with approaching budgeting beforehand was that I wasn’t looking at the budget as tool representing a real lifestyle. I thought I needed to just make the budget and try to stuck to it somehow. That inevitably failed because the ‘somehow’ stands for a bunch of new ideas about how to live your life differently which you can’t just have by making a budget.
But for keeping track of time, I got stuck pretty early and haven’t returned to it. My idea was to start easy and classify my time into 3 categories: work, home, and other. I made them purposely broad so that (i thought) it’d be hard to fail at. I was going to take note of what ‘other’ meant and then further divide that category as well. Work and home seemed like a good place to start because a) I’m already good at scheduling work so that’s easy, b) work and home are like foundational things to my life, like they’re the things that need to be done to enable anything else I do, and it’s mostly the ‘anything else I do’ that I was having trouble scheduling, so I thought I’d start with stuff that’s less hard? (home included things like chores, admin, family). I don’t really remember why it failed. I think I would just forget to do it. Also, I wonder if my categories were too vague. Maybe it’d be better to just describe broadly what it is I do with every block of time. I’m interested in trying again and keeping more of an eye on what I’m doing.
~yeah ive done that before. issue i ran into is related to what i shared about getting caught up in stuff. whenever i gave myself game time i ended up just playing for way longer than intended. same with breaks. if i do anything really enjoyable(?) during my breaks i got caught up in it and struggle to get back to my task. nowadaus what i tend to do for breaks is to just go for a short walk or something but to not do anything too overstimulating or whatever
I’m a bit tired right now so I could be misreading a bit, but the stuff you posted right after the above quote seems to deal more with scheduling than just keeping track of what you actually do with your time.
Oh yeah I can see it that way, it gets a bit blurred near the end. But I wasn’t talking about blocking out time in advance using those categories (which I think would be scheduling); I was talking about keeping track using the categories. Some categories I was already good at scheduling for so I knew I thought it’d be easier to keep track of them.
That happens to me too when trying to schedule. Like i didnt anticipate wanting to play even longer. I end up not abiding by the schedule.
I think it probably has to do with like convincing oneself about how good an activity really is for them(the scheduled activity vs the playing for longer)
I’ll try that out too. I want to get better at scheduling or, I guess, do scheduling in the first place but I don’t really know where my times goes. I think I’m more aware than others of how much time I spend on things other than what I say I want to spend it on, but its still good to have an actual good idea.
Do you do things like scheduling out your day? Have you had success with it? Have you found tracking your time has helped you with scheduling?
Yeah. Looking back, one reason i think this happens is because games are just more fun than the other things I was doing. Going from a 2 hour study session to a couple minutes of a fun game is quite stimulating(?). I went from something I found really boring/taxing back to something I found really fun and now going back to that taxing thing feels like a huge struggle. I think the days I had less of this issue was going in between tasks that I didn’t find as boring and then playing games as a break.
Like I think I could much more comfortably take a short break playing a really fun game if I was just doing some chores. Chores aren’t too taxing for me (mentally at laast) so I feel like its easier for me to not get caught up in the game.
I have a similar thing where if I’m doing something more fun then my scheduling basically fails or gets majorly compromised.
I wonder if people who are good at scheduling feel different about switching from more fun to less fun tasks because their schedule works well and they see themselves getting the right amount of both activities overall. That might make switching tasks non-coercive.
Being able to avoid coercion seems important for being good at making and adhering to a schedule. I think self-coercion is something I run into a lot when trying to schedule and it causes failure.
Unfortunately not. I don’t think I used my time tracking data well though and coerced myself anyway.
I’ve had the same problems as you guys wrt break time.
I’ll try again but using my tracking data and a good amount of flex time.
You would write down the start times of your activities? I find the amount of clicks/actions to be the most important thing for time tracking software. Otherwise it feels to cumbersome and I don’t want to do it. Toggl shows you your timer on the lock screen which you can stop, so that’s the least amount of clicks possible.
Yeah that’s a good point and something I didn’t realise was such a downside of my previous attempt untill I just tried Toggl today. Toggl seems really cool and I’m going to try it out for a little while. I like that you can stop and start up an activity again and can add them together.
I wonder as well. I think they probably value other stuff that makes it not suck to switch activities. Like, if the new activity is actually less fun than the former then they gotta see something that makes it worth doing.
It sounds like you guys (@Eternity@LMD@ActiveMind@Dface) may be influenced by TCS ideas about coercion, scheduling, tidiness and more.
I thought all of you found FI/CF after I’d largely stopped writing about TCS. For many years, I’ve written about it rarely and mostly negatively.
So if you’re influenced by TCS, I wonder how that’s happening, like where you’re getting your info. It seems like you may have some bad ideas from TCS.
I don’t remember well, but I think I did read TCS ideas and articles after finding FI. I don’t know how I stumbled upon them or why I was curious. I think I just saw it mentioned a few times and thought it was important to study.
I don’t know if finding curi.us around 2017-2018 counts as finding FI
I should’ve paid more attention that you wrote mostly negatively about it. I really wish i questioned the stuff more. It just didn’t sound right to me reading about some of the coercion stuff i read.
I think it’ll be good to investigate. Like maybe find the articles I got the ideas from.