So I’m really struggling with this timeblocking idea, and also with the whole idea of being indistractable. I woke up this morning and I felt kind of depressed, actually. I just wasn’t looking forward to the day at all. I think the reason is that I feel boxed in by having a schedule, having to stick to blocks of time. For me, writing in the mornings is just this opportunity to clear my mind, get it all out on paper and deal with any problems that come up, so that I can get on with my day feeling happy, and knowing that I’ve gotten the essentials done already so there’s nothing else to really worry about.
By limiting myself, for example, in my journaling, limiting that to 20 minutes because that just happened to be how long I spent on it yesterday, I may be losing the whole power of that exercise. One of the reasons I’ve always loved to get up early is that I get this sense of having an unlimited amount of time available. It’s not exactly true, but when you have 3 hours before the rest of the world is up and likely to be messaging you, that can feel like an unlimited amount of time.
The other thing I’ve realise is that my mornings generally work pretty well for me, and they have been doing for over a decade now. My afternoons do get away from me, and from time to time if I don’t have any freelance work I can lose some of my mornings too, but by and large I am pretty focused and don’t really give in to too many distractions in the morning. Some of the tips I’ve been reading this week about time management and focus have turned out to be stuff I tend to do anyway. In fact, with my freelance work I’ve always used timeblocking. I don’t schedule it into a specific slot in my day, but when I sit down to work I do it for a set amount of time and I’m good at just working until the time is up. I don’t very often get distracted during a block of work. In fact, I find it incredibly annoying when I am interrupted.
So I think I might stick with the way I do things already for the morning routine part of my day at least. What I might do is just block off a large amount of time such as 6am until 10am as for my morning routine, and then allow myself to use that time however I want.
There are two areas where things don’t work quite as well I think. Firstly, with my freelance work, because it’s been really up and down lately, I don’t really have a routine in place, because I can go for a few days without any work, and then I’ll be busy again, to the extent that I’ve even been working weekends sometimes to try to make up for some lost weekdays. So what I think I’d like to do is block off some time each day that will be for my freelance work if I have any, or for marketing my freelance business, or for extra writing/blogging time. The problem here is I’m not good at sticking to plans if I think they don’t make sense any more. So for example if it’s a lovely day outside and I don’t have any actual work to do, I would probably decide to go and sit in the garden and read, or if my mum asks me if I want to go somewhere with her I might say yes to that, simply because I can. On the one hand, that was the whole point of working for myself in the first place, to give myself flexibility. On the other hand, it’s easy to find your entire life taken over by other people’s requests, or just other timewasting tasks, and that’s why I was interested in the whole indistractable method in the first place.
The other way things don’t work currently is that I tend to fritter my afternoons away once I’ve completed my essential work for the day. Or at least that’s what I thought I was doing. However, when I tried to timeblock my week, and fit in all the tasks that I want to do, all the stuff I’m not currently doing, such as home and garden maintenance, hobbies, admin, etc, I quickly found that I couldn’t actually fit it all in! Even when I tried to schedule my ideal week, where I wouldn’t waste any time at all, and would move seamlessly from task to task, there just wasn’t anywhere near enough time. This, I have to say, is somewhat confusing to me. I am a freelancer and I only do a maximum of 2h hours of freelance work per day. I also have to do some admin for that, such as answering emails, making invoices, assessing projects and making quotes. But I would say that takes a maximum of 1 hour per day. I sleep at the most for 8 hours per day. I have no children. I don’t even socialise very much. Where on earth is all my time going?
Well, taking today as an example, I woke up around 6:30 this morning but I didn’t get up until nearly 7. It’s now almost 10 so I’ve been up for 3 hours, and so far I’ve spent most of that time writing, some of the time planning and watching a couple of YouTube videos on time management, and a small amount of time cooking and eating my breakfast. I’ll probably take another half an hour to finish off this blog post and publish it. Then I normally also spend half an hour on Duolingo each morning, which will take me until almost 11am. I always go shopping on a Friday and prefer to do it in the morning, and I’m not even showered and dressed yet, so that will add another hour and a half, taking me until 12:30 by which time I’ll be hungry again. Cooking and eating takes about an hour so we’ll be at 1:30 and I won’t even have STARTED doing my freelance work yet. Even if I did it all in one block (which I never do), that will be 3:30, then admin and emailing (and I’d love to do my accounts which I haven’t done for a few weeks now but would ideally like to do weekly), so then we’re at 4:30, gardening takes us to 5pm, housework to 5:30 and then we’re so close to dinner I may as well start early. So the whole day gone and really I don’t feel like I’ve exactly WASTED time, but I’ve also only just barely got the basics done, and this isn’t even an exercise day as I’m still building back up after my recent ultra.
So I’m not sure this is the most interesting topic for a blog but things I’ve noticed about where my time goes are: I spend a LOT of time cooking and eating. I cook three meals a day from scratch and it does take a long time. It IS a priority for me to eat healthily but I notice when other people are showing their calendars online they don’t really seem to spend any time at all eating! Secondly, my day pretty much ends at 6pm. At the latest. That’s when I kind of down tools and start cooking, and then I take my dinner and watch TV, and that’s usually it for the rest of the evening. This is where I think the real time suck happens. I love watching TV, I love settling in and knowing my work is done for the day and I get to zone out, and maybe play some iPad games. I do this every day except for Tuesdays when I’m out until 8pm running, but even then I usually do an abbreviated version and stay up later than usual, just so I don’t miss out on my TV/games/relaxing/the world can’t hurt me now I’m safe routine.
So that was a lot of words just to get to the conclusion that I’m running scared, just barely getting through my day, so that I can numb out every evening for at least a couple of hours. It’s what I’m aiming for every day. What would I do without it? In the past when I have managed to ban TV altogether I’ve just replaced it with reading while I eat. Which is better I think in that it’s not as addictive and usually I end up reading some self help stuff which can be beneficial.
My conclusion? I’m not happy. I’m not thrilled by how I’m living my life. I’m fearful. I’m just getting through what I have to do in order to get to the prize, which isn’t even that great a prize, TV and iPad games and food. On repeat.
Timeblocking, and becoming indistractable, it’s a great ideal, if you know what you want from your life. If you know you really want to do X but for some reason you keep doing Y. But what if those things that you think you SHOULD be doing, when you actually finally force yourself to do them, don’t make you happy? What do you do then?
I know this seems like a very miserable post, but I hope to continue exploring this topic and hopefully get to a positive answer! The whole point is not to just box yourself into a life you don’t even want, to force yourself through discipline, but to figure out WHY you keep turning to YouTube or TV. What’s missing in your life that’s causing you to feel the need to spend hours every day staring at a screen instead of living? TBC.