Can a sharing model based on free/pay-what-you-want resources be sustainable over a long period of time?

I've been thinking about this for a number of reasons:

• One of my assistants e-mailed me about my difficulties with delegation. He suggested thinking of my life as a business: What would my objectives be? When I reflected on that, I realized I had some discomfort around the ideas of customers and business models. Was my life more like science and exploration? Not quite, either. I left the thread of thought unresolved.
• Problogger posted this mind map of different ways to monetize a blog. I realized that I'm not keen on advertising, physical products, selling/flipping blogs, premium content/communities/products, affiliate marketing (except for books I like, and even then those offer tiny commissions and it feels a little hypocritical to do that given that I hardly ever buy books myself), and other indirect methods. I might be okay with coaching, if I can come up with a good workaround for the impostor syndrome.
• In an interview about Quantified Self and life experiments, a journalist asked me to describe my business. I felt that social business consulting wasn't the real crux of my current life's work, and that talking about writing and publishing e-books would be incomplete without exploring why free/pay-what-you-want pricing is important to me. Answering his question prompted me to think about my motivations a bit more.
• Harold Jarche wrote about the exposure economy and his decision to limit his sharing. I understand where he's coming from – by mom gives similar lectures to aspiring photographers who have yet to internalize that "exposure" won't buy them new equipment. But there's something else that drives me to share more, not less, and I want to understand that.
• @ljconrad retweeted a link to The Gift of Being Uncommon, which included a segment on "gift reciprocity versus market economy." It says that people "may have difficulty charging sufficiently for their work, especially if they view their own abilities, products or insights as gifts that need to be shared with others." I've requested Lewis Hyde's book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World from the library, and I'm looking forward to digging into it further.
• The contrast of a gift culture versus a market economy reminded me of Eric S. Raymond's "Homesteading the Noosphere" (2000). I revisited its sections on gift culture, art, and reward. It made me think: Is reputation a major driver for me? How does this work out if my ideal outcome does not involve parlaying that reputation into economic opportunities like jobs or gigs?
• And that reminded me of Tom Morkes' guide to pay what you want pricing, and the breadth of people using the PWYW strategy. I'm always delighted to get a note from Gumroad that someone has purchased one of my resources, but I'm still working on getting my anxious side to accept that this is okay.

So that's my context.

Mulling all those things, I realized that the model I can use to understand my desire to share isn't business (with its customers, markets, and exchanges of value) or modern science (with its funding from institutions and competition around publications).

It's philosophy. Ancient philosophy, not professionalized modern philosophy.

What were the "business models" for ancient Greek and Roman philosophers? How did they sustain themselves?

2015.01.10 How did schools of philosophy work in ancient Greece and Rome – index card #independence #philosophy

2015.01.10 More about philosophers – index card #independence

• The Cynics begged in the streets. (I'd rather avoid that option.)
• People or schools received gifts (from students, from other people in the community, etc.).
• People or schools had rich patrons.
• People charged tuition, offered private tutoring, and so on.
• People worked in unrelated occupations. For example, Cleanthes philosophized during the day and carried water at night.
• People had private means: estates, investments, and so forth. Seneca had a fortune (acquired through less-palatable means). Atticus inherited wealth and grew it through real estate.

Some philosophers taught in closed schools: Pythagoras kept an exclusive brotherhood. Others taught in public, like Zeno did.

I don't quite think of what I do as philosophy, but I can learn from how these schools worked. For example, using philosophy as a lens, it makes sense to me to share in public for the following reasons:

• More people can learn.
• Ideas stand a greater chance of being remembered and used. (By other people, and by me!)
• I can grow from the conversation.

This last point is particularly important to me. I'm still figuring things out. I don't feel that I'm quite at the stage where I can teach people well – when I have clear paths and well-tested lessons. I'm still at the stage where I try to live as well as I can, making and sharing useful things. People's questions often help me realize something I didn't know I knew. I'm nowhere close to sharing wisdom suitable for the ages (and might never be).

2015.01.11 Current state and future states – index card #writing

With that learner's perspective, it doesn't make sense to me to limit the circle of people I can reach, or to charge people for the privilege of my being able to learn from them. But it does make sense to be open to gifts – of money, sure, but especially of time, skills, experience, and perspective.

2015.01.10 Lessons from ancient Rome – index card #philosophy

In fact, reflecting on how ancient philosophers managed their ups and downs helped me address more of my anxiety over whether a financial mistake might break this freedom. After all, life back then was way more volatile than life is now. What's a downturn in the stock market like compared to the whims of emperors and the possibility of exile? I have fewer pressures on my life and more resources than people back then could imagine. (Searchable books! The Internet! Amazing text editors! Boggle.) If I want to learn about interesting things, potential changes in my situation shouldn't stop me.

So here we are. I don't know if Kevin Kelly is right about 1,000 True Fans (or John Scalzi about a larger, more modest base). "Fan" isn't quite what I'm going for, anyway. I want co-adventurers, co-figure-out-ers – ideas bumping into each other in conversations, the back-and-forth of experiments. Maybe a teacher will appear and guide me. Maybe students will help me discover what I can teach. I've found some role models to help me understand sharing, and I'm looking forward to seeing if that can still work in the modern world – or better yet, what we can do with it.

My annual review showed me that despite my resolution to reduce consulting and focus more on my own stuff in 2014, I actually increased the amount of time I spent working on client projects than I did in 2013 (12% vs 9%). Sure, I increased the amount of time I invested in my own productive projects (15% of 2014 compared to 14% in 2013) and the balance is still tilted towards my own projects, but I’d underestimated how much consulting pulls on my brain.

This is the fourth year of my 5-year experiment, and I’m slowly coming to understand the questions I want to ask. In the beginning, I wanted to know:

• Do I have marketable skills?
• Can I find clients?
• Can I build a viable business?
• Can I get the hang of accounting and paperwork?
• Can I manage cash flow?
• Can I work with other people?
• Can I deal with uncertainty and other aspects of this lifestyle?
• Can I manage my own time, energy, and opportunity pipeline?

After three years of this experiment, I’m reasonably certain that I can answer all these questions with “Yes.” I’ve reduced the anxiety I used to have around those topics. Now I’m curious about other questions I can explore during the remainder of this experiment (or in a new one).

In particular, this experiment gives me an rare opportunity to explore this question: Can I come up with good ideas and implement them?

I’m fascinated by this question because I can feel the weakening pull of other people’s requests. It’s almost like a space probe approaching escape velocity, and then out to where propulsion meets little resistance and there are many new things to discover.

The most worthwhile thing I’m learning from this experiment, I think, is to sit with myself until the urge to work on other people’s projects passes. Arbitrarily deciding that Tuesdays are no longer consulting days (leaving only Thursdays) seems to work well for me. I find that I can pick things up readily on Thursdays. The rest of the time, I think about my own projects. Mondays and Wednesdays are writing days, Tuesdays are coding days, and Fridays are for administration and wrapping up.

Last year, I found it easy and satisfying to work on other people’s requests, and harder to figure out what I wanted to do. It’s like the way it’s easier to take a course than it is to figure things out on your own, but learning on your own helps you figure out things that people can’t teach you.

What’s difficult about figuring out what I want to do and doing it? I think it involves a set of skills I need to develop. As a beginner, I’m not very good, so I feel dissatisfied with my choices and more inclined towards existing projects or requests that appeal to me. This is not bad. It helps me develop other skills, like coding or testing. Choosing existing projects often results in quick rewards instead of an unclear opportunity cost. It’s logical to focus on other people’s work.

One possibility is to build skills on other people’s projects until I run into an idea that refuses to let go of me, which is a practical approach and the story of many people’s businesses. The danger is that I might get too used to working on other people’s projects and never try to come up with something on my own. In the grand scheme of things, this is no big loss for the world (it’ll probably be all the same given a few thousand years), but I’m still curious about the alternatives.

The other approach (which I’m taking with this experiment) is to make myself try things out, learning from the experience and the consequences. If I’m patient with my mediocrity, I might be able to climb up that learning curve. I can figure out how to imagine and make something new – perhaps even something that only I can do, or that might not occur to other people, or that might not have an immediate market. Instead of always following, I might sometimes be an artist or even a leader.

What would the ideal outcome be? I would get to the point where I can confidently combine listening to people and coming up with my own ideas to create things that people want (or maybe didn’t even know they wanted).

How can I tell if I’m succeeding? Well, if people are giving me lots of time and/or money, that’s a great sign. It’s not the only measure. There’s probably something along the lines of self-satisfaction. I might learn something from, say, artists who lived obscure lives. But making stuff that other people find remarkable and useful is probably an indicator that I’m doing all right.

What would getting this wrong be like? Well, it might turn out that the opportunity cost of these experiments is too high. For example, if something happened to W-, our savings are running low, and I haven’t gotten the hang of creating and earning value, then I would probably focus instead on being a really good follower. It’s easy to recognize this situation. I just need to keep an eye on our finances.

It might also turn out that I’m not particularly original, it would take me ages to figure out how to be original in a worthwhile way, and that it would be better for me to focus on contributing to other people’s projects. This is a little harder to distinguish from the situation where I’m still slowly working my way up the learning curve. This reminds me of Seth Godin’s book The Dip, only it’s less about dips and more about plateaus. It also reminds me of Scott H. Young’s post about different kinds of difficulty.

As a counterpoint to the scenario where I find out that I’m not usefully original and that I’m better off mostly working on other people’s things, I hold up:

• my Emacs geekery, which people appreciate for both its weirdness and their ability to pick out useful ideas from it
• the occasional mentions in books other people have written, where something I do is used to illustrate an interesting alternative

So I think it is likely that I can come up with good, useful ideas and I can make them happen. Knowing that it’s easy to get dissatisfied with my attempts if I compare them with other things I could be working on, I can simply ignore that discomfort and keep deliberately practising until either I’ve gotten the hang of it or I’ve put in enough effort and must conclude that other things are more worthwhile.

If you find yourself considering the same kind of experiment with freedom, deciding between other people’s work and your own projects, here’s what I’m learning:

It’s easy to say yes to other people’s requests, but it might be worthwhile to learn how to come up with your own.

Following up on an interview, a journalist asked:

If I were to say that you freelance as [blank] consultant, what would be the word that fills that blank?

2015-01-14 Filling in the occupational blanks – index card #experiment #occupation

Tricky question. "Freelance" is definitely the wrong word for it, since I doubt I'll be taking on any more clients and the word obscures my current fascination with a self-directed life. It might make sense to use the word "independent" if we really need to contrast this with stable employment.

Technically, I spend a fraction of my time consulting, and I can define the kind of consulting that I do in a compact phrase. But based on my 2014 numbers, that's only 12% of my time. This is much less than the 37% of the time I spend sleeping, or even the 18% of the time I spend on discretionary projects or the 15% of the time I spend taking care of myself (not including the 7% of the time I spend on chores, errands, and other things).

Since no one gets introduced as a sleeper even though that's what we mostly do with our lives, maybe my discretionary projects will yield a neat occupational description for people who need to have that introductory phrase.

• Am I a writer (3%)? ("Author" is a smidge more self-directed and respectable, maybe, but I still don't feel like I've written Real Books since all my resources are compilations of blog posts). A blogger? This is a category so large, it could mean anything.
• A sketchnoter (3%)? Alternatively: a sketchnote artist or a doodler, depending on whether I'm making it sound more respectable or more approachable. But the popular understanding of sketchnotes (if there is one) is that of recording other people's thoughts, and I'm focusing on exploring my own questions.
• An Emacs geek (2%)? Too obscure; it doesn't provide useful information for most people. Maybe an open source developer, which also includes the 1% of the time I spend coding – but I do more writing about software than writing actual software or contributing to projects. An open source advocate? But I don't push it on people or try to change people's minds.

In the rare meetups I go to, I usually mention a bunch of my interests (drawing, writing, coding, experimenting), and people pick whatever they're curious about. But most times, I try to preempt the "What do you do?" question with something more interesting for me, like what people are learning about or interested in. It's so much easier when someone recognizes me from my blog, because then we can jump straight to the interests we have in common.

From time to time, I come across people who persistently ask, "But what do you do? What's your day job?" I confess it's a bit fun to tweak the box they want to put me in. One approach I've heard other people use is to playfully acknowledge the difficulty of categorization. "On Mondays, I _. On Tuesdays, I _. On Wednesdays, I___. …" Others gleefully embrace descriptions like "I'm unemployed."

But I'm missing the purpose of that introductory phrase or that short bio here. It's not about shaking up the other person's worldview. At its best, that occupational association helps the listener or reader quickly grasp an idea of the other person's life and where the other person is coming from. An accountant probably has a different way of looking at things than a primary school teacher does. One's occupation provides the other person with the ability to contextualize what one says ("Oh, of course she thinks of things as systems and processes; she works with code all day."). During small talk, it gives people easy things to talk about while they're waiting for a more interesting topic of conversation to appear: "What kinds of things do you write?"

Let's say, then, that my goals for this phrase would be:

• to help people understand my context quickly, and how that might differ from their perspective
• to make the other person more comfortable by:
  • being able to associate me with a stereotype that adds information, possibly fleshing out this mental profile with differences later on
  • in conversation, letting them easily think of questions to ask, addressing the phatic nature of small talk (we're not actually talking, we're making polite noises)
• to branch off into more interesting conversations, avoiding the dead-end that often comes up after the ritualistic exchange of "What do you do?"

Of these goals, I like the third (interesting conversations) the most.

Here are a few of my options:

• I can accept convention and pick one aspect of what I do, especially if I tailor it to their interests. For example, at a business event, I might introduce myself as a social business consultant who helps really large companies improve internal collaboration through analytics and custom development for enterprise social network platforms (well, isn't that a mouthful). At visual thinking events, I might introduce myself as a sketchnoter focusing on exploring my own ideas.
• I can waffle by introducing several aspects, still within the vocabulary of regular occupations: a consultant and a writer, for example.
• I can say, "It's complicated!" and explain my 5-year experiment, self-directed living, and learning/coding/writing/drawing/sharing.

Anyway, circling back to this writer and his likely use of some kind of occupation as a way to introduce and contextualize me:

• It might be interesting to play with no occupational categorization. Some context may be provided by age (31) – it's common enough in newspapers and books. The editor might send it back with a question, "Yes, but what does she do?", but there it is.
• It might also be interesting to play with my difficulty of categorization. "Sacha Chua, who couldn't come up with a single phrase to describe her occupation, …"
• Or, since it's no skin off my back if this is not fully representative, I could just let him write whatever he wants to write. Freelance consultant. Blogger. Sketchnoter. Amateur experimenter. Independent developer. "Consultant" is a very small part of my identity, actually, so developer or blogger might be interesting. A possible missed opportunity here is that the wrong frame might result in people not being able to identify with and learn from stuff ("Of course she can deal with this, she's a coder"; "Bah, another blogger, is that all she does?"; "Why should I listen to her? Freelance is just a fancy word for unemployed."). But it'll do under time pressure. =)

I'm writing this on January 14 and posting this in the future (because I limit posts to one a day), so the article will likely be out by now. If I remember, I'll update this with what he actually used. =) But I needed to think about it out loud, and I'm sure the situation will come up again in the future. Perhaps by then I'll have a more compact way to describe myself.

Since other people have figured this out before, I can learn from them. (And possibly from you!) After all, I'm nowhere near as interesting as Benjamin Franklin or Leonardo da Vinci, and somehow they managed to settle down into a sequence of nouns. Here's the one from Wikipedia's entry for Leonardo da Vinci:

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer.

Three or four nouns should be a good thing for me to strive for, eh? Even one or two nouns, if I can get to some level of distinction.

As for introductions – people can pick whatever aspect they want. I am multi-faceted and growing. =)

Alan Lin asked:

One issue I have is prioritization. I sometimes find myself spending a lot of time on low-impact activities. How do you tackle this in your life? What's the most important thing you're working on right now?

It's easy to feel that most of your time is taken up with trivial things. There's taking care of yourself and the household. There are endless tasks to check off to-do lists. There's paperwork and overhead. Sometimes it feels like you're making very little progress.

Here are some things I've learned that help me with that feeling:

1. Understand and embrace your constraints.
2. Lay the groundwork for action by understanding yourself.
3. Act in tune with yourself.
4. Accumulate gradual progress.

1. UNDERSTAND AND EMBRACE YOUR CONSTRAINTS

Many productivity and time management books seem to have the mindset where your Real Work is what matters and the rest of your life is what gets in the way. Sometimes it feels like the goal is to be able to work a clear, focused 60-hour or 120-hour week, to squeeze out every last bit of productivity from every last moment.

For me, the unproductive time that I spend snuggling with W- or the cats – that's Real Life right there, for me, and I'm often all too aware of how short life is. The low-impact stuff is what grounds me and makes me human. As Richard Styrman points out in this comment, if other people can focus for longer, it's because the rest of their lives don't pull on them as much. I like the things that pull on me.

Instead of fighting your constraints, understand and embrace them. You can tweak them later, but when you make plans or evaluate yourself, do so with a realistic acceptance of the different things that pull on you. Know where you're starting from. Then you can review commitments, get rid of ones that you've been keeping by default, and reaffirm the ones that you do care about. You might even find creative ways to meet your commitments with less time or effort. In any case, knowing your constraints and connecting them to the commitments behind them will make it it easier to remember and appreciate the reason why you spend time on these things.

One of my favourite ways of understanding constraints is to actually track them. Let's look at time, for example. I know I spend a lot of my time on the general running of things. A quick summary from my time-tracking gives me this breakdown of the 744 hours in Oct 2014, a fairly typical month:

Assuming that my consulting, writing, and working on Emacs are the activities that have some impact on the wider world, that's 144 hours out of 744, or about 19% of all the time I have. This is roughly 4.5 hours a day. (And that's a generous assumption – many of the things I write are personal reflections of uncertain value to other people.)

Even with tons of control over my schedule, I also spend lots of time on low-impact activities. And this is okay. I'm fine with that. I don't need to turn into a value-creating machine entirely devoted to the pursuit of one clear goal. I don't think I even can. It works for other people, but not for me. I like the time I spend cooking and helping out around the house. I like the time I spend playing with interesting ideas. I like the pace I keep.

So I'm going to start with the assumption that this is the time that I can work with instead of being frustrated with the other things that fill my life.

An average of 4.5 hours a day is a lot, even if it's broken up into bits and pieces. It's enough time for me to write a deep reflection, sketch one or two books, work on some code… And day after day, if I add those hours up, that can become something interesting. Of course, it would probably add up to something more impressive if I picked one thing and focused on that. But I tend to enjoy a variety of interests, so I might as well work with that instead of against it, and sometimes the combinations can be fascinating.

Accepting your constraints doesn't mean being locked into them. You can still tweak things. For example, I experiment with time-saving techniques like bulk-cooking. But starting from the perspective of accepting your limits lets you plan more realistically and minimize frustration, which means you don't have to waste energy on beating yourself up for not being superhuman. Know what you can work with, and work with that.

You might consider tracking your time for a week to see where your time really goes. You can track your time with pen and paper, a spreadsheet, or freely-available tools for smartphones. The important part is to track your time as you use it instead of relying on memory or perception. Our minds lie to us about constraints, often exaggerating what we're dealing with. Collect data and find out.

2. LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR ACTION BY UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF

When I review my constraints and commitments, I often ask myself: “Why did I commit to this? Why is this my choice?” This understanding helps me appreciate those constraints and come up with good ways to work within them.

My ideal is to almost always work on whatever I feel like working on. This sounds like a recipe for procrastination, an easy way for near-term pleasurable tasks to crowd out important but tedious ones. That's where preparing my mind can make a big difference. If I can prepare a list of good things to do that's in tune with my values, then I can easily choose from that list.

Here are some questions that help me prepare:

• Why do I feel like doing various things? Is there an underlying cause or unmet need that I can address? Am I avoiding something because I don't understand it or myself well enough? Do I only think that I want something, or do I really want it? I do a lot of this thinking and planning throughout my life, so that when those awesome hours come when everything's lined up and I'm ready to make something, I can just go and do it.
• Can I deliberately direct my awareness in order to change how I feel about things by emphasizing positive aspects or de-emphasizing negative ones? What can I enjoy about the things that are good for me? What can I dislike about the things that are bad for me?
• What can I do now to make things better later? How can I take advantage of those moments when I'm focused and everything comes together? How can I make better use of normal moments? How can I make better use of the gray times too, when I'm feeling bleah?
• How can I slowly accumulate value? How can I scale up by making things available?

I think a lot about why I want to do something, because there are often many different paths that can lead to the same results. If I catch myself procrastinating a task again and again, I ask myself if I can get rid of the task or if I can get someone else to do it. If I really need to do it myself, maybe I can transform the task into something more enjoyable. If I find myself drawn to some other task instead, I ask myself why, and I learn a little more about myself in the process.

I plan for small steps, not big leaps. Small steps sneak under my threshold for intimidation – it's easier to find time and energy for a 15-minute task than for a 5-day slog.

I don't worry about whether I'm working on Important things. Instead, I try to keep a list full of small, good things that take me a little bit forward. Even if I proceed at my current pace–for example, accumulating a blog post a day–in twenty years, I'll probably be somewhere interesting.

In addition to the mental work of understanding yourself and shifting your perceptions by paying deliberate attention, it's also good to prepare other things that can help you make the most of high-energy, high-concentration times. For example, even when I don't feel very creative, I can still read books and outline ideas in preparation for writing. I sketch screens and plan features when I don't feel like programming. You can probably find lots of ways you can prepare so that you can work more effectively when you want to.

3. ACT IN TUNE WITH YOURSELF

For many people, motivation seems to be about forcing yourself to do something that you had previously decided was important.

If you've laid the groundwork from step 2, however, you probably have a list of many good things that you can work on, so you can work on whatever you feel like working on now.

Encountering resistance? Have a little conversation with yourself. Find out what the core of it is, and see if you can find a creative way around that or work on some other small thing that moves you forward.

4. ACCUMULATE GRADUAL PROGRESS.

So now you're doing what you want to be doing, after having prepared so that you want to do good things. But there's still that shadow of doubt in you: “Is this going to be enough?”

It might not seem like you're making a lot of progress, especially if you're taking small steps on many different trails. This is where keeping track of your progress becomes really important. Celebrate those small accomplishments. Take notes. Your memory is fuzzy and will lie to you. It's hard to see growth when you look at it day by day. If you could use your notes (or a journal, or a blog) to look back over six months or a year, though, chances are you'll see that you've come a long way. And if you haven't, don't get frustrated; again, embrace your constraints, deepen your understanding, and keep nibbling away at what you want to do.

For me, I usually use my time to learn something, writing and drawing along the way. I've been blogging for the past twelve years or so. It's incredible how those notes have helped me remember things, and how even the little things I learn can turn out to be surprisingly useful. Step by step.

So, if you're feeling frustrated because you don't seem to be making any progress and yet you can't force yourself to work on the things that you've decided are important, try a different approach:

1. Understand and embrace your constraints. Don't stress out about not being 100% productive or dedicated. Accept that there will be times when you're distracted or sick, and there will be times when you're focused and you can do lots of good stuff. Accepting this still lets you tweak your limits, but you can do that with a spirit of loving kindness instead of frustration.
2. Lay the groundwork for action. Mentally prepare so that it's easier for you to want what's good for you, and prepare other things so that when you want to work on something, you can work more effectively.
3. Act in tune with yourself. Don't waste energy forcing yourself through resistance. Use your preparation time to find creative ways around your blocks and come up with lots of ways you can move forward. That way, you can always choose something that's in line with how you feel.
4. Accumulate gradual progress. Sometimes you only feel like you're not making any progress because you don't see how far you've come. Take notes. Better yet, share those notes. Then you can see how your journey of a thousand miles is made up of all those little steps you've been taking – and you might even be able to help out or connect with other people along the way.

Alan has a much better summary of it, though. =)

To paraphrase, you start by examining your desires because that's the only way to know if they're worthwhile pursuits. This thinking prepares you and gives you with a set of things to spend time on immediately whenever you have time, and because you understand your goals & desires and the value they add to your life, you are usually satisfied with the time you do spend.

Hope that helps!

Related posts:

• Learning slack (Dec 2014)
• Growing slowly, adjusting the speed (Oct 2013)

Thanks to Alan for nudging me to write and revise this post!

I do a lot of things that productivity books and blogs tell you that you shouldn't do, and I don't do a lot of the things they prescribe. I wake up late. I read e-mail, but I don't respond to it for a week or two. I go for variety instead of focus. I don't try to motivate myself to reach time-bound goals or follow pre-set plans. Instead, I figure out what I want to do at the moment, and I go and do that.

What does that look like, day-to-day? Here's what a typical day might be:

I wake up at around 8 or 9 after an average of 8.3 hours of sleep (although in November, the average was much higher). I stay in bed another twenty minutes or so, easing myself into wakefulness. During this time, I might do a quick scan of blog posts, Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, and my e-mail. Sometimes I think of a few ideas I would like to explore that day, and I type that into Evernote on my phone so that I don't forget.

Eventually, I leave the warmth of the duvet, slip into a fuzzy bathrobe, and head downstairs for breakfast. I feed the cats, too. After breakfast, I head back upstairs to brush my teeth and take care of other morning routines. I return to the kitchen (often still in pajamas), open my computer, and think: What do I want to think about today? What do I want to learn about? I look at my lists and outlines for ideas.

Depending on what I feel like doing, I might spend some time programming or writing. If I don't feel particularly creative, I might read instead. I review my Org Mode agenda in Emacs to see what I need to take care of today, and I check my other lists for unscheduled tasks that might be good to do too. I keep my notes in large, lightly-structured text files so that I always have something to work on.

Here's the important part of my routine, I think: I'm almost always taking notes. I keep a text file open on my computer as I program or debug, writing down the things I'm considering or where I'm getting stuck. I write, and I write about writing. Even when I'm away from my computer, I try to write brief notes on my phone.

People often think that taking notes takes too much time and slows you down. I find that notes help you cover more ground. When I don't take notes, I get frustrated because I can feel my brain trying to jump from one topic to another too quickly. I forget. I have to figure things out again. Notes help me a lot. They don't even have to be complete notes. Sometimes a phrase or two is enough to help me get back from interruptions or pick up loose threads.

I publish as many of my notes as I can. They often help other people, and I get to learn even more from the conversations on my blog. Publishing my notes also makes them easier to back up and search.

Back to my daily routines. At some point in the afternoon, I might respond to e-mail. I usually try to do this at least once a week, although sometimes I let it slip for longer. Sometimes I nap or take a break. Then I check in with myself again: What do I feel like working on now? There's often a little time to get another chunk done before dinner.

We go to the library and the supermarket a few times each week. Sometimes we cook; sometimes we have left-overs. Evenings are for tidying up, taking care of things, and relaxing. Sometimes I read books I've borrowed from the library, or spend some more time writing, or play video games, or practise sketching.

When I go to bed, I catch up with W- and then read a little: often something unproductive but fun, like fanfiction with a rational bent.

After we turn out the lights, I wrap up by thinking a little about how I would like the next day to turn out: What do I need to do? What do I want to learn? What would make things even better? I dream my way into the next day.

I think I do less than many people do. I feel like I live at a more relaxed pace. Still, my weekly reviews show me more crossed-off tasks than I expected. My monthly reviews show that I keep moving forward on my plans. Whenever I do my annual reviews, I can see some difference between the past and the present. So maybe it's not that I'm particularly efficient at doing things, but I'm good at keeping track of the progress.

I share my time data publicly, so if you're curious, you can dig into it and find out more about what a typical day is like.

I don't think I have any awesome productivity secrets. I live on the same 24 hours as everyone else. But I enjoy asking questions, taking notes, looking for opportunities for little improvements, and sharing what I learn along the way, and I think that's what people respond to. If I can do this with a fairly relaxed pace, you can probably do something similar with your life too. =)

Related:

• Predictable advice about productivity (the backstory for this blog post)
• When you feel like you're spending a lot of time on low-impact activities