I was originally planning on doing another series of posts about getting organized, but those proved difficult to write (mostly because my mind has been churning on other ideas that I’m more excited to work on). I wanted to write about the topic because it’s something that I’ve been working on this year, and I think I’ve been making some real progress in it.
As someone who has a ton of interests (reading, writing, playing games, playing music, watching TV shows and movies, and learning new things to name most of them), giving enough time to each one has been one of the biggest challenges of my life. This has resulted in huge backlogs in each area, since I will get really passionate about one interest, spend a few months focusing on it, and then moving on to the next thing. Of course those few months aren’t nearly enough to go through all of the crap I’ve accumulated, whether it be unplayed games, unwatched movies, or story ideas that haven’t been written about at all. Just about the only thing that I have been able to keep up with is music, but I’m more easily forced into that by being in a band.
And that doesn’t even include all of the time I need to spend just being an adult. Chores always have to be done. I need to eat everyday. Exercise is becoming more necessary as I get older. I don’t even want to think about what’s going to happen when kids start appearing. And of course I still have to spend the majority of my days making money. Thankfully, I love what I do for work, it is my one true passion that never gets old (though the projects I work on often do).
So I have been working on ways to get the most of my time for years. It will always be a work in progress as things change, but I thought I would share some of the things I’ve been doing lately that seem to be working quite well.
Dealing with Chores
Ah chores. No matter how many times you do them, they always need doing. I’m sure it is for that very reason that most people put off chores until the last possible minute (or just not do them at all). I haven’t really been having that problem lately though, and I’ll explain why. There are basically two things I’ve done to make chores easier to get done.
First, I categorized my chores in terms of priority, frequency, and amount of time needed. Just as a few examples:
- Wash the dishes - high priority, daily, 10-20 minutes depending on amount of dishes
- Empty the catbox - highest priority (don’t want to miss this), every two days, 5 minutes
- Make dinner - medium priority (I can always go out if I don’t have time), 3 times a week, 20-40 minutes (any longer than that and I tend to not be interested in making it)
- Take out trash/recycling - medium priority, 2-3 times a week, 5 minutes
- Dust and vacuum apartment - low priority, once every 1-2 months, 2 hours
Second, once you have things categorized, batch them into chunks and put them at times when you are more likely to actually get them done. The latter point is probably the more important aspect as I’ve recently discovered. I used to be horrible about doing the dishes every night after dinner. I would usually just let them pile up for a couple days and then do a whole dishwasher load in one go, which would take way longer to do. So I made one simple change that has gotten me to do dishes every day and it takes a lot less time: I moved the chore to the morning instead of the evening. Now when we have dinner, I put the dishes in the sink and let them soak overnight, then take care of them in the morning after I shower. A very simple change, but I don’t stress about doing them after dinner now, so I have more relaxing evenings, and doing them in the mornings is a snap.
The other aspect is batching them. So now in my mind, I have a morning batch and an evening batch (weekends are usually just one morning/afternoon batch). In the morning batch before work, I have dishes and catbox (sometimes dinner if I’m using the slow cooker). In the evening batch, I have dinner and any trash/recycling that needs to be taken out. By knowing this in advance, I can judge how much time I will need since chores are no longer spontaneous. The other thing I do is that I make sure that these batches get done as soon as possible. I do my morning chores immediately after showering, and I do my evening chores immediately after getting home. The instant you sit down to relax, the likelihood of procrastinating skyrockets. You will actually save time and stress this way because when it’s done, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. If you decide to rest a bit before doing it, the need to do it just gnaws on your mind and you start hating the task. Just get it over with first and enjoy your day/night.
Exercising More Often
I like exercising. I don’t love it, but I do enjoy it. However, I have always been bad about actually doing it, at least since I’ve had a full time job. When I had a part time job I was exercising every day, but what else are you going to do? For the last five years it’s just been a cycle of getting into a good mindset, signing up for some gym (or using another available facility), aiming to do at least 3 times a week, and then never actually getting there for a couple months before quitting again. So then I tell myself it will just be easier to do it at home, I have enough equipment to do it. Doesn’t change anything. I try moving my schedule around to exercise in the morning before work, right after work, or right before bed. Nothing works.
At least until now. One of the things I decided last year was that, since I enjoy running now more than I ever did before, I want to work up to doing a marathon in the next couple years. So I’ve been doing a 5K every month for a few months, and I discovered something that I didn’t expect. While I was terrible about going to the gym to get conditioned for the 5K, actually going to the 5K was easy. Why was that? It couldn’t have been because of money, I was paying for both. No, it was the time constraint. Doing a 5K is easy because it starts at a time and it goes until I’m done with it. Most gyms don’t have that unless you want to pay more money to sign up for classes.
At around the time I was realizing this, an Orange Theory Fitness opened up in my area. I didn’t know anything about it, but I knew my current gym plan wasn’t working, so I started investigating other options, and it came up. Instead of being a normal gym, all you have are classes, and you just pay for what you use instead of having the buffet plan of regular gyms. I immediately thought that this would be a great solution to the problem I was facing, and so far I have been absolutely right. I’m only obligated to go twice a week, a time is set, and it’s very easy to show up.
So if you are like me and have trouble getting motivated to go to an all-purpose gym (mostly by yourself, having a buddy will help significantly too), then just doing classes might be the right solution for you too. Granted, it will usually cost more, but it has been well worth it for me.
Killing the Backlog
This is probably going to be the most obscure one for most people, mostly because I’m using a tool that few people will know about or understand. As I stated in the beginning of this post, I have a lot of interests. Having a lot of interests (and a decent amount of spending money) leads to big backlogs of things that I want to do. Big piles of games, books, movies, TV shows, etc. Also being the kind of person that I am, I want to keep track of all these things so that I can measure progress and know what I still have remaining.
Back when the lists were small, I could get away with just having a simple computer document that listed them all out. But then that became a hassle. So then I looked for online solutions and realized that there’s a backlog type of system for every geekery. I was using Netflix to keep track of TV shows and movies I wanted to watch, Goodreads to keep track of my books, Backloggery to keep track of games, and so on. And this worked for a while. But then I was having to juggle multiple sites to keep everything going. I needed something simpler.
And then I came up with an ingenious idea: bug tracking software. Specifically the one we use at Amazon, JIRA. Certainly not what it is designed for, but it has two major advantages that I’m absolutely loving. First, it has a lot of flexibility, so it’s very easy to keep track of my tasks (aka a game/movie/book) and categorize them for quick access. Second, with the sprint planning functionality, I can plan out what I want to do for the next month and be able to set realistic expectations for myself. I know that I can manage about 3 hours a day, on average, to do things that I want to do. That comes out to around 90 hours a month, so I can set up that much stuff to do and feel confident that I can get most of it done.
To me, this tool makes perfect sense because I’m a programmer and it’s something that I already use regularly. For most other people, it probably doesn’t make sense, but I would bet that another online program with similar functionality wrapped in a more user-friendly interface would probably do really well. I can attest that my focus has been a lot better since I started using it, and I get encouraged when I see how many things I’m actually getting done every month.
Incentivizing Goals
Just one last section before I leave you, and this one is more recent so I can’t say if it’s really going to work in the long run or not. It was just an idea I came up with after listening to an interview about gamification. The general concept is that you can get more engagement from regular people by providing a game-like reward system for doing things, specifically things that are not games in and of themselves. A lot of apps do this to retain customers, especially when it comes to fitness or learning, which is absolutely great because those are great areas to use reward systems.
So I posed a question to myself: is there a way that I can gamify my long-term goals so that I’m more likely to do continuous work on them? Some things I thought of specifically were: learn enough French to get by when we visit Paris later this year, get into good enough shape to run a half/full marathon, actually publish some works of fiction, get better at playing guitar, and become a more proficient cook. There are plenty more, but those are things that I’m actively working on.
My solution was an incentive system. If this proves to be successful, I can post the full rules that I came up with, but the basic idea is this: You define some goals to work on. Using those goals, you create rewardable actions that you can do that will get you closer to that goal. For example, when learning French, you just have to do the lessons, so doing lessons counts as a rewardable action. Each rewardable action is worth a certain amount of points, generally 1-5 based on difficulty. You get points each time you do a rewardable action, and you can exchange those points for an actual reward. I have it set up so that the reward has to be provided by someone else since it’s too easy to just reward oneself for no reason at all. The better the reward, the more points it costs. Very simple system.
To be honest, it hasn’t been catching on with my girlfriend and I too much yet, but that might just be because we don’t have any pre-defined rewards yet, so we don’t really know what we’re working towards. I think once those are in place, the incentives to do well will increase. It’s an experiment, so I will probably talk more about it in the future.
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This ended up being pretty long, but it probably should be considering that I’ve been silent for half a year. It is in my goals to be better about this, and I’m using my successes above to make it easier to find time for writing. It’s been on the forefront of my mind for a couple weeks, so I suspect it is about that time for writing to make a comeback for me. Look forward to it.