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On a Scheduled Life

First Published: 20 January 2025

Draft 1

As I mused about at the start of the year, I want to stop wasting time. The easiest way to do that, as I can see, is to see what I actually do with my time, and also to make sure that the things I want to do are on the list. I opened all the posts1 that even vaguely referenced schedules as I prepared to write this post.

However, before that I made my actual schedule.

“How?” you might be asking, either as someone looking for insight into my mind or as someone who wants to organize their own life. It was certainly not the most time efficient method, though I think that it may have ended up as the optimal method for me.

First, I sat and intentionally did not have audio going. I know that may be obvious to many, but your brain cannot think as well or deeply or freely if you’re listening to an audiobook. From there, I started writing down my goals for the day, and that led quickly into the things that I generally want to do, and their regularity.

I traveled to a new location2 and took that messy document3 and compiled it into two pages: goals for the day and my general musings. The goal for the day was nominally in linear order, but the musings were not in the slightest. My general musings had me breaking my life into:

Of course, I was not immediately able to annotate the importance of items without having the full list. More than that, though, I don’t love absolute measurement scales, and so I started with my first item, decided that it wasn’t very important, and assigned it a low score. The next item on the list seemed relatively more important, so I gave it a six. The next item was even more important, so I gave it a seven. Item 4 was in between items two and three for importance, so I gave it a 6.3, since I felt like it was closer in importance to item two than item one. I continued this through the entire list.

Now that I’m done with it, I do find it interesting that so many of my goals were in the 6 to 7 range and the 8 to 9 range, with nothing between 7 and 8, and only a single item below 6.7 Even if the exact values might change, it does show me that I have one goal I don’t care about8, one goal I care about a lot9, groups of goals that are very important to me10, and groups of goals that are moderately important to me.11 I do keep some absolute scaling, I guess, because nothing was a 1012, and nothing was a sub-413.

I then took my annotated pieces of14 paper home and didn’t look at it until today. Before bed, however, I made a list of tasks that I wanted to accomplish today in my bedside journal.15 Upon waking up and going through parts of my morning ritual16, I sat down with the two pieces of paper and the goals from yesterday’s journaling17 and grabbed some more blank paper.

First, I wrote in large letters and a sectioned off block the nominally immovables in my schedule. That is, the things that happen at a set time. I say nominally because in that list was also when I work18 and a few things that have rough end times. Below that I made a list of all the things that I had sorted yesterday, now ranked from most to least important. The new list looked something like:

That is:

One of my big goals was making use of the fitness class access pass I bought for the semester. They break all activities into one of four categories:

I always want more cardio fitness, generally enjoy feeling stronger, and would love to be flexible and in touch with my body. As a result, I then went to the page where they listed each activity per category, e.g. for the made up category of “Fun”

I did my normal way of deciding between options, ranking each item in relation to the rest, and started ranking them on the page:

Which means that22 I think that I would probably enjoy yoga and sleeping the same amount, though if I had to choose I’d lean towards yoga. Sleeping is significantly preferable to singing songs. Singing songs beats out testing gravity, which beats out touching grass.

After going through each of the four categories, I made my overall ranking, which unsurprisingly was almost entirely less than or equal to signs.23

From there, I went down and listed every single option on the calendar that the school provides, because I prefer being able to look through hand written pages, because I don’t like their layout24, and because there were only a few activities that I cared about. I did make this new list still broken down into category, e.g.

Etc. etc.

On a new page, I looked back at the group fitness goals I had29. Of the four activities I compiled, I wanted to make sure to do three of them at least once a week. I then went through and tried to find a way to do that. Because of prior commitments, there was only a single time each week I could do a barre class30, a single time a week I could do Zumba, and a nice yoga spot every morning before I wanted to get to work, so below the listed set of workouts with prior constraints removed, I made a list of what I wanted to do each day and when.

From there, we moved on to the actual scheduling part of my time.31 I started by listing the events that I wanted to do, starting with waking up. Using my time estimates, I was able to back track how early I would need to wake up in order to get each item I wanted to do before work done before going to yoga. Thankfully everything except for the 4 fit. It took some restructuring, because as I walked through the morning in my mind, I realized that I have a connection where some activities feels better to move into others. Like those logic puzzles where everything is given relative referents, I found a solution that worked, along with the quick time reminder of how long each would take.

Saturday and Sunday were the odd ones out, because neither has work, and so timing is weird. Since there’s another yoga slot later in the morning on Saturdays, I just moved the entire schedule so wakeup is at the same relative time to yoga. Sunday I set the wakeup time with the other five days of the week, but decided to go to it last.

Because my schedule diverges daily after yoga, I then went through my Monday through Friday schedule, noting the activities that I wanted to do before going home, with time stamps where relevant. On the next page, I started to plot out what I wanted to do each night, and what I also wanted to do differently each night. I also started plotting out ideas for Sunday. At this point, Monday through Friday is nominally scheduled from waking to sleeping32, and Saturday and Sunday are relatively empty. Looking at the ordered list of floating items, I was happy to se that most all of them were done, with only the weekly tasks yet to be assigned. I made a list of those items under the day I felt like they belonged, since floating items only need to be scheduled relative to the fixed items and each other if relevant.

I then made my weekly flowchart, which diverges and converges fairly often. Because routines are important, I tried my best to keep the divergent streams as similar to each other as possible. I also put literally everything I could think of as a necessary part of the schedule33 as an example, because cognitive load is bad.

I opened another small journal and made nine lists:

Finally, two hours after beginning, I was finished with my goal of plotting my ideal life. Most of it will be as simple as following a checklist, with the only34 cognitive load coming at the beginning and end of each day, where I go over my short term goals, and at the beginning and end of each week, where I do the same with slightly longer term goals.35 I’m hopeful that this will work and that it will make my life better.

Now to look at all the previous times I’ve tried and failed to see if there might be any common patterns:36

It’s very possible that I missed some posts there, but I don’t really care that much. I think that the important pieces for me in particular to remember about my aversion to schedules are:

All this being said, I do hope that I am able to maintain my life when the summer, with its constant interruptions to schedules, arrives.

Daily:


  1. I should really add some meta data to them so I can sort more easily. Not entirely sure how to do that, though, so would have to ask for help

  2. for unrelated reasons

  3. 5 hand written pages on top of already printed paper

  4. brew something again, start writing my thesis in earnest

  5. I feel like I’m using more itemized lists in my blog these days. Wonder what that’s about

  6. also these are made up examples, because I want to illustrate the system better, and while I understand it, I think that it’s generally helpful to show manufactured examples to make sure details are clear

  7. which, in retrospect, might be why it’s so clumped.

  8. the 4

  9. the 9

  10. 8-9 range

  11. 6-7 range

  12. life or death

  13. things I don’t care about

  14. white, printer

  15. musing to come

  16. i.e. putzing (I always forget that not everyone throws the occasional yiddishism into conversation) around

  17. transferred from the journal to another

  18. which is flexible

  19. 5m

  20. D

  21. hence question mark

  22. from bottom to top

  23. because I only picked my favorites from each category and there’s something in each category I value

  24. I understand that overlapping class times makes things hard, but listing two events on top of each other because one lasts ten minutes longer hurts me

  25. because in going through the rest I realized that what I wanted from Sleeping was equally available from other sources

  26. R means Thursday

  27. Sunday

  28. Saturday

  29. between 2 and 6 times a week

  30. cardio and flexibility! Perfect for someone like me with neither

  31. Why did I spend the last thousand or so words on fitness? Because that’s what I spent my time on, and it only seemed fair to say so

  32. though I will be very clear that there are two activities called “sit in silence”, and I always try to be pessimistic about how long things take because bonus time is fun

  33. turn on kettle for tea

  34. scheduled

  35. Long term goals go here

  36. in alphabetical order by URL

  37. except for using less social media to communicate

  38. oof 2022 is not one year plus away anymore

  39. i do feel like I’m more and more treating footnotes as asides and annotations, rather than parentheticals. I should think about whether that’s the goal or not. Certainly using hyperlinks is a good way to avoid needing to link, but. Eh a topic for another musing

  40. which is something that I’m hoping nested lists like I have might help

  41. wow I just got hit with a wave of sadness, remembering how healthy and energetic mom was then

  42. Reading each night is definitely one of them. The afternoon workout can be skipped at least a few times a week

  43. short of starting the day over, I’m realizing I don’t know of too many that work reliably for me

  44. I’ve generally been skimming the posts, if you’re wondering how I missed a good one

  45. so no pomodoro

  46. and probably physical

  47. which is my shockingly accurate gauge of my general well being

  48. Which is the point of nightly goals, use the remaining brain power before reset to decide. Transfer in morning in case light makes me change my mind