• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 620 0

actual answer. YOU MUST TRACK YOUR TIME. Before you start trying to schedule productivity, it is vitally important that you see where your time is going on an average day. Any good scientist knows (you will become a scientist of time) that you can’t start experimenting until you have some data as your Point A. It is SO much easier to change that which has been quantified. Download the free timer at NerdistWay.com (or whatever clock you have the strongest bond with) and over the course of a day click it every time you start doing something different. The clock comes with a ruled text field, so type in whatever that new thing is each time. THIS INCLUDES EVERYTHING. “Answered emails,” “Went on Etsy to find clown paintings,” “Played Angry Birds while pooping,” whatever you do. I want you to see exactly where your time goes each day so you then can start manipulating it. Sculptures are not very compelling without clay. (Except for ice sculptures. They’re beYOOtiful.) This time chart will be your clay and your schedule is the sculpture you’ll end up with.

When you see your whole day broken down and measured, you will begin to see gaping holes where you could be focusing on important things like furthering your career and contributing to society. And, of course, figuring out where to put your dick-around time. When you can learn to do this, your schedule will become modular units of time that you can place in any order you see fit. The clouds will part, animals will sing, and you’ll surf a beam of light up into the sky to high-five your deity of choice.

CHARACTERCIZE

Track your time in a day.

Write down how long you spend on each activity.

Marvel at the results!

MODULAR SCHEDULING: 1, 2, 3!

“Look, you douche with strategically messed-up hair, I REALLY don’t have any free time!!!” you say.

Even if you already categorize yourself “a busy human,” I guarantee you will still find capsules of free time that you didn’t notice were there. Here’s how: If you did the previous Charactercize, you’ll find that a percentage of it is devoted to drifting off, spacing out, or even worse, false productivity. “False productivity” is a silent killer, and the web is MASTERFUL at it. You see, gentle reader, the web tricks us into thinking we’re accomplishing something because we are constantly absorbing information. To our brain, we are indeed learning stuff, it’s just usually not stuff we can apply to our professional lives or betterment. Here’s a typical example, ripped from the pages of my own life (from “Diary of a Self-Help Dropout,” Wired, issue 17.01, Jan ’09):

My girlfriend informs me that there’s a black widow nesting in a drainpipe near our garage. I have now been on the GTD program for several days and am a next-action machine. I say out loud to myself in a robot voice, “Processing . . . dot dot dot . . .” I head outside, already planning my next action: “Pour water down drain to send spider on river rampage to Jesus.” On the way, however, I discover a dead squirrel. Protocol interrupted. How do you dispose of a dead squirrel? I return to the house with my bucket of water to ask the Internet. A state of California Web site informs me that I have to call the West Nile Virus Hotline. WTF?! I open a new tab and Google “West Nile deaths human California.” Only one this year. Next action: Let air out of lungs. Back to westnile.ca.gov. From the photos, I identify the decedent as a Fox squirrel. While scrolling through, I notice that its cousin the Douglas squirrel is adorable! I throw it—the words, not the squirrel—at Wikipedia. Pine squirrel located in the Pacific coastal states. Huh. I jot down “pine squirrel” for use in as-yet-unwritten funny sentence. Back to the ’pedia. Naturalist John Muir described the Douglas squirrel as “by far the most interesting and influential of the California sciuridae.” . . . Sciuridae?

How has that term managed to elude me for more than three decades? I click the link and learn that it’s a family of large rodents—squirrels, chipmunks, marmots, and, uh, spermo-philes. I wonder how