The transition from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time is always a little shocking. Suddenly the sunlight’s gone by 5 PM. It always used to make me feel a little colder, a little odder. This year, I’m playing around with some mindset shifts that might do for Standard Time what renaming “winter” to “baking season” did in terms of my happiness. =)

(Click on the images for a larger version.)

Since my consulting engagement has flexible hours, I can arrange my schedule so that I commute during off-peak hours, and I work from home three days of the week anyway. Sunlight is important to me, so I go for a quick walk at lunch. This means that on the days that I work on-site, I’m not too tired when I get home in the evenings, and on the days I work at home, I have time to go to the library or run other small errands.

That frees up the evening for writing, drawing, learning, coding, and all the other things that fill my discretionary time. Having a long evening means I can break it into several chunks of useful, focused work, while still taking care of chores. It feels pretty relaxed – almost freeing! Maybe this will become something that will help me look forward to shorter days.

Mornings are worth playing around with, too. I thought about shifting more of my waking hours to the morning because it often comes up in productivity advice, but I like being able to sleep in a little. That said, I also like lining things up so that I can gain momentum in the morning, and the bright sunshine is nice to enjoy.

This mindset shift looks promising. It breaks down yet another one of those barriers to making the most of life year-round. How do you deal with shorter days? Any tips?

Noorul asked, "How do you generally begin your day and how does it span? Do you plan for each hour or do you plan a task across many days/weeks?"

I have three kinds of days:

• Weekends are reserved for spending time with W- or friends, helping out around the house, cooking, and getting ready for the next week. I take an hour for my weekly review, and I often have more time to write or read, but I don’t count on it – people get first dibs.
• Consulting days – Tuesdays and Thursdays, usually, although I’m planning to take all of August off. I wake up, have breakfast, get ready, bike, work from about 10 to 5 (earlier or later, depending on attention and need), bike back, and then go to a meetup or spend the rest of the day at home.
• Discretionary days – Wide-open and wonderful, these are the days when I follow my interests freely: writing, coding, drawing, learning… Sometimes I punctuate them with meetings—I’m practising talking to people. 

I briefly experimented with planning my life in detail before, assigning tasks to specific days or even blocking off hours in my calendar. I wanted to make sure that important tasks didn’t fall off my radar and that I didn’t overcommit my day. It didn’t really work for me – I kept moving things around depending on how I felt.

What works for me now? Minimizing commitments, thinking in terms of weeks, making decisions moment by moment, and always having good things to choose from (it helps to keep track of good ideas). Not wasting energy in beating myself up about what I haven’t done; instead, I celebrate the things I do.

Here’s what my decision process looks like when I ask myself, "What do I want to do right now?" It’s roughly in terms of priorities, although I might pick something lower on the list if that’s what I really want, and I save chores for downtime.

1. Does W- need my help with any projects?
2. Have I promised anything urgent to anyone?
3. Are there chores to be done?
   1. Is the kitchen clean?
   2. Is there laundry to be done?
   3. Does the garden need watering?
   4. Do the litter boxes need to be cleared?
   5. Do things need to be tidied a little?
   6. Have I gotten a bit of exercise?
4. Do I want to work on my computer?
   1. Do I have something to write about? What am I curious about?
   2. Do I feel like coding?
   3. Do I feel like drawing?
      1. Do I want to draw my own things? 
      2. Do I want to work on a book review?
5. Are there books I want to read?
6. Do I have Japanese flashcards to review?
7. Is there e-mail I need to reply to?
8. Are there stories I want to read?
9. Do I want to reach out to anyone and brighten their day?
10. What else do I want to do?

I prioritize things based on happiness, relationships, energy, what I’ve been doing recently (momentum!), what I haven’t done recently, whatever else comes to mind…

E-mail and social networks are pretty far down my list. Sometimes I trawl my inbox for blog post ideas, and once in a while, I go through my inbox to reply to as much as I can. (I try to do this every week, although sometimes it stretches.) TV and movies are background activities, to be saved for sessions of laundry-folding or coding – almost always DVDs checked out of the library, so that we can watch with subtitles and rewinds. In the interstitial time between activities, I do flashcards or read blog posts on my phone.

Commitments go on my planner (Org Mode in Emacs, for flexibility); all the rest are unscheduled tasks that I can review by context or look up by project depending on what I’m interested in or drawn to. There are things that I plan to do that I don’t end up doing, but that’s because they get preempted by things that are more important to me.

So that’s the discretionary stuff. What about our routines?

I wake up at 8 or 9, snoozing if I feel sleepy. I use the bathroom, wash my mouth guard, let the cats drink from the faucet. Downstairs, I have our "standard breakfast": one fried egg with brown rice, sometimes even two eggs as a weekend luxury. I head upstairs to brush my teeth and dress up. Then I pack my lunch and whatever I need (if I’m going outside) or settle into working on my own projects on our kitchen table or at our standing desk. W- leaves for work, J- leaves for school. If I’m at home, I have a simple lunch (salad? home-made frozen food?), and then I move on to whatever I want to do next. J- comes home, W- comes home. We have dinner, and then it’s time for chores or exercise or a little more writing. I tidy up, shower, brush my teeth, and go to bed at roughly midnight, although sometimes I stay up later.

I’m lucky. We keep our lives simple so that we have time.

How do you decide what to do?

See also: How I use Emacs Org Mode for my weekly reviews

I was talking to a couple of other Quantified Self Toronto members about the management of unstructured time, since one of them was taking a gap year from school and the other one had just wrapped up regular employment. “How do I make sure I don’t waste my time?” they asked.

Here’s what I’ve been learning from semi-retirement: it can be easy to make good use of your discretionary time. (And to feel like you’re making good use of it!)

When I was planning for this experiment, I worried that I would end up frittering away the time on frivolities that people frown on: vegetating on the couch, playing games, getting sucked into the blackholes of social media and random Internet browsing.

It turns out that when you fill your life with so many more interesting possibilities, it’s easy to choose those instead. It reminds me of something I’ve learned about finances, too. Many activities make me just as happy as other activities do, so I might as well pick activities that are free or inexpensive and that align with my values. Likewise, I might as well pick activities that give me multiple benefits or that align with how I want to spend my time. A movie is diverting and it’s also good for learning about emotions and storytelling, but watching a movie while folding laundry is more useful than watching a movie in the theatre. I enjoy cooking more than I enjoy eating out. I enjoy writing, drawing, or spending time with W- more than I enjoy playing games.

So I don’t fill my days with plans or box myself in with calendared intentions. I look at the week ahead and list tasks that I need to remember, promises and appointments I’ve made, and maybe make space for one or two personal projects or ideas that I don’t want to forget about. I have a regular client engagement on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which I do because I like the client and what I get to help them with. Sometimes I take a week or an entire month off, to re-set my sense of time. Even during my regular weeks, I try to leave plenty of space.

It’s important to have space to follow where your interests and energy take you. I try to minimize the number of things I’ve promised to other people so that I have the flexibility to follow opportunities when they come up. That way, if I don’t feel like writing, I don’t. Maybe I’ll draw. Maybe I’ll code. Maybe I’ll work in the garden. Maybe I’ll tidy the house. Maybe I’ll read. Maybe I’ll plan.

I make exceptions for conversations. It’s hard to not schedule those if I want to make sure they happen at some point. Left to my own devices, I might never get around to talking to people. So I pay someone to handle my scheduling, and I ask her to space some of the optional ones apart (maybe one a week?) so that I have room for focusing on my things. It’s a little weird scheduling three or more weeks in advance, but space is important.

The rest of the time goes to whatever I feel like doing the most at that moment. It helps that I feel good about the things that I want to do, like writing, coding, and drawing, and that many of the things I do are also valued by others. I remember coming across in some book (was it Early Retirement Extreme? I should dig that up again) the idea that you can raise your skill in some activities or hobbies to the point that people are willing to pay you for it (now or in the future). Other things like exercise or cleaning the kitchen have their own rewards.

Did I luck into wanting these things by nature, or did I shape my wants to fit what I wanted to do? It’s hard to say. Most of it feels natural, but I do consciously tweak my motivations. Here’s an example of where I’m deliberately working on hacking my wants: exercise. W-‘s been helping me build a strength training habit through lots of encouragement and positive reinforcement. I also remind myself that the time I spend exercising will pay off both short-term and long-term, and that helps me get better at picking it over other alternatives (ex: bike to work and get some exercise versus work from home). It’s like what Mel wrote about digging out a path of least resistance so that it goes where you want to go. The other day, I was on my bike for almost 4 hours: 6 short trips, back and forth, covering mostly the same ground. I might not add as much to my “Done” list, but it’s good for me.

One of the benefits of choosing to spend my time this way is that it’s easy to say no to the common time-wasters that people often beat themselves up about. You don’t feel that need to escape because you haven’t been trying to keep yourself disciplined all day long. This also means that you aren’t wasting the emotional energy you’d otherwise use to beat yourself up about bad decisions. =) There are tasks that I postpone or don’t get around to, but it’s not because I suck. it’s just that I wanted to do other things instead, and I may get around to those tasks someday.

Even leisurely activities become experiments. I spent one Monday watching animé practically the whole day. I’m studying Japanese, so I watched the episodes with the original soundtrack and English subtitles. It was fun hearing the sounds start resolving themselves into intelligible words… and it was interesting feeling that barrier of “Oh, I should be doing productive things because it’s a weekday morning!” start to erode as I learned more about giving myself permission to follow my interests. (It turned out that watching those animé episodes was great for helping me follow along with the audio and the script. I often listen to just the audio as a way to immerse myself in the language and enjoy commuting or working… Bonus!)

Maybe the trick to managing an unstructured schedule isn’t to get better at discipline, but to get better at wanting good things, to get better at seeing the value in different activities. Then you can trust in yourself, with a little review and feedback so that you can tweak your course and make better decisions. At least that’s what seems to be working for me, and it might be something that would work for you too. =)

Before I started my business, I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself with large swaths of discretionary time. Not free time – all time has a cost – but discretionary time, time that I can direct towards my own purposes. I thought I’d be able to use the time well, but I didn’t know for certain.

I’m starting to be more confident in how I use that time. Sure, I spend some of it hanging out with W- and J-, or exploring the constructed world of LEGO Batman 2… but I also use it to experiment with writing e-books or learning how to build mobile applications.

It’s incredible, picking your own goals and making steady progress towards them. I carved out a decent amount of carefully-protected discretionary time even when I was working for a large company and we made good use of our staycations, but even that doesn’t compare to being able to block off large chunks of time on your own. Vacations and weekends are social, and evenings often are as well. It’s great to have time to still your mind and follow your own questions. A room of one’s own, to learn and write and create.

There’s always the temptation to schedule things over it so that I don’t confront the blank canvas of a day. I meet people occasionally. It’s good for me to talk to people – and, more useful, to listen; not everyone writes. It’s also good to do this in moderation. It’s easy to talk about doing business and being in business and what to learn about business, but I shouldn’t stop there.

So there are days when I sit down and focus on the tasks I set myself. I’m becoming more accustomed to managing this time. I make lists — things I can do, topics I want to learn about, an endless supply of self-directed adventures. There’s always more to learn.

I’ll be consulting on-site four days a week for the next few weeks, but I’ll be playing around with other time arrangements soon. I’m setting aside all of September for discretionary time, and then returning for two days a week of consulting throughout October and November. We’ll see how that goes. I think it’ll go well. Adjusting the training wheels as I learn more about managing my time, energy, and attention!

I track my time so that I can find out if I’m spending enough time on the things that matter. For example, I find it easy to get sucked into work because I enjoy programming, but if I spend too much time at work, then I might not spend enough time developing other interests or sleeping. I’m also curious about how much time it takes me to do things so that I can estimate tasks better. Since much of my work involves consulting, being able to bill time accurately helps as well.

Off-the-shelf apps like TimeRecording helped me get started quickly, and it was easy to use the CSV export to analyze my data. When I had developed the habit of tracking my time and decided that it was worth investing in further, I began building my own system. QuantifiedAwesome.com is a Rails application that lets me track time, clothes, library books, and a bunch of other things that I’m curious about. The offline mode doesn’t work right now, but the web-based interface makes tracking easy.

I’ve set up a hierarchy of categories that somewhat follow the OECD leisure time study so that I can compare my individual metrics with international ones. For example, I count writing as Discretionary – Writing and cleaning up as Unpaid Work – Tidy.

To track, I type a substring into a text field of my dashboard. For example, if I want to say that I’m starting to tidy up now, I type in tidy and press Enter. I can also update it from my phone. Autocomplete will suggest categories if I type in text and wait a little.

I can backdate entries, which comes in handy when I start doing something while away from my computer or phone. For example, if I want to say that I spent the last 40 minutes gardening, I can type in -40m garden. It also understands things like -2h social, or 5/31 7:30 routines.

If I spent the entire day away from the Internet or if I have quite a few timestamps to enter, I can use the batch mode. The batch mode lets me specify a date and entries of the form:

7:00 category1
8:00 category2
13:30 14:00 category3

Sometimes I need to make the system recalculate the ending timestamps and durations. I can do that by expanding the options for the records list and choosing Recalculate durations.

My system makes it easy to see weekly or monthly summaries, and I can review the records by category or by time as well.

So that’s how I’m currently tracking my time. I’d like to get the mobile interface working again so that I can quickly update it while on the go, or rig up import/export from apps like Time Recording or Tap Log Records so that I can use those instead. I also want to build more reports that can help me answer questions like:

• What do I spend my time on?
• How does that time fluctuate?
• Are there any gaps or oddities that might indicate that I’m missing an entry or I’ve encoded things incorrectly?

I also want to import my old data so that I can analyze it. When that settles down, perhaps I’ll add another layer of granularity too!

It turns out that when I have more control over my schedule, I don’t fill it with development. I haven’t been working on open source or personal projects, much less client websites or applications. This is a surprise to my 2010 self, who figured she would spend the whole day coding if she could.

I spend most of my discretionary time learning instead: drawing, writing, Latin, business, life. Maybe it’s because I’m in the fledgling stage of business and there’s so much to learn. Maybe it’s because 3-4 days of consulting a week takes up a large chunk of brainspace. Maybe it’s because development won’t get me where I want to go in this short-term search for a business that can survive unpredictable schedules and the primary care of young children.

Learning time. Yeah, that seems like the focus that fits me. If I imagine days and weeks stretching ahead of me – maybe in half a year, after this consulting engagement – I can easily see myself spending time exploring ideas and sharing my notes. I’d want to plumb this, deepen my understanding of this, before I focus on something like development.

Self-structured learning time is intimidating, but I want to see if I can get past the initial anxieties and figure out things that work. Writers have been able to do so for millennia. Things will be okay.

I’ll still build things, of course. Code is a powerful way to crystallize learning and make it easier for people to do better. It also helps me ask questions that would be hard to answer manually.

Okay. I give myself permission to focus on learning after this. I know I’ll probably feel that itch to do something that creates immediate or measurable value for people. That’s okay. I might feel insecure at some point. That’s normal. But there’s so much I want to learn, and I think I’ll be able to stay motivated even without outside drivers. Worth trying it out and sticking with it through at least the initial bumps.

This will be fun!

(Thanks to Mel Chua for the nudge!)

One of the things I really like about this business experiment is my new time flexibility. I work on a consulting engagement for three to four days a week. I spend the rest of the time on other things: meeting people, learning stuff, practising skills.

I’m still getting the hang of managing that time. It’s been a while since I’ve had large chunks of solo discretionary time to work with. It’s so different from weekend time. During weekends, we usually spend one day handling all the chores and getting the house sorted out, and the other day relaxing and hanging out with each other or with family and friends. These weekdays are different

The weeks will be even more different when I wrap up with this consulting engagement. I’ll probably refer consulting or freelancing gigs to other people for the next little while. I think that by August, I’ll be ready to make the most of full weeks, and I’ll have some ideas to focus on building.

It’s almost as if I’d set things up so that I can learn gradually, although I don’t think I could’ve engineered having such great clients right out of the gate. Instead of going from full-time employment to full-time experimentation, this transition period helps me learn how to manage my time and energy when there’s no one calling the shots but me. The consulting engagement gives me some structure, regular interaction, and a clear task list, and my discretionary days let me practise moving towards my own goals.

Looking at it on a day-by-day basis works well, but not amazingly. I feel energized and engaged throughout the day. When I make my decisions day by day, though, I find that some things keep drifting to the the bottom of my list. Between the habits I’m working on building (ex: study Latin for at least half an hour, draw for at least an hour) and the appointments I make, I sometimes don’t shift into the mood to work on some things, such as responding to mail or working on book summaries. It’s a little more embarrassing because I know time isn’t the limiting factor. It’s more about interest and energy.

If I plan my day more, I can probably shift into the right mindset easily. For example, I might make a short list of current projects using Org Mode, the Emacs-based organizer that I use. I can set aside small chunks of time to make steady progress on the kinds of projects that benefit from that, such as languages. For projects that benefit from larger chunks, I might dedicate a 4-hour slot for concentrated work, and choose different projects to work on each time. Planning will also help me make progress and track it even if I’m working with small steps, such as with habits.

Here are the current projects I’m working on, how far I want to take them, and why:

Ongoing habits:

• Write: If I don’t take notes, I can’t review them. Writing helps me understand, remember, and revisit ideas. Time commitment: At least 30 minutes a day. Chunks of 1-3 hours, the occasional quick note.
• Practise drawing: I want to communicate more effectively. Drawing is both fun and useful. This also includes learning how to use different tools. Time commitment: at least 30min each day, often chunks of 1-2 hours.
• Finish the exercises in this beginner’s Latin textbook: I want to learn Latin because it hacks my brain. Besides, schoolboys before managed to do it, so why shouldn’t I? Time commitment: 30min each day
• Garden: Water and weed the garden as needed; plant new seeds occasionally. Time commitment: 15 minutes a day
• Cook: Prepare bulk meals. Time commitment: 3-4 hour sprint.

Special projects:

• Quantified Awesome: Make this even better so that I use it to track and analyze more data.
• Miscellaneous work: Supporting a Rails site, etc.