November 2024 - Rebuilding My Scheduler
I'm cheating on this one, but mainly because I've been feeling stressed in the latter half of this year in general, and I've been itching to get back into writing. You know what this means.
Anyway, there's always some stuff I lose track of when I'm busy, that I would rather not lose track of (or that I'd rather dismiss actively rather than feeling bad about them later on when I notice). I used to have a planning software for this, but that had the unfortunate habit of dying and corrupting all the config files, and let's be honest: It's just not fun to set these kinds of things up again. I also didn't really want to have all my dysfunctional hobbies flying around in an online profile, so there wasn't a backup for the stuff. Either way, I found a more stable solution which I now need to A.) populate and B.) get myself back in the rhythm of. I've started doing this back in late September, but I'm hoping to finish it this month, while I mostly write for this month's blog entry. So far this includes some of my technically daily chores and responsibilities that I know I can do after hours, but have often chosen to ignore. This makes me a little sad, because I like my floor to be clean, for example. Anyways, I've managed to recover most of the regular schedule (which includes some of these posts as well, by the way). One of these days I need to write a tool like this that exactly serves my purpose, but I'm not sure when that'll be. Expect to see this topic crop up again.
For now though, I'll stick with one of those android apps that more or less does what I need. Somehow none of them ever do exactly what you want them to, but the list of checkboxes will have to suffice. Interestingly, most of the stuff on the list, if you do them for more than twenty minutes will start developing a buffer - or in some cases here - catch up. Since I'm behind on several of the things that I wanted to do weekly. My "Weeklies", if you will. I've also come up with several other things I might want to do, and how to do them, so I'll look into scheduling those sensibly as well.
With a scheduler, a lot of things come more easily to you, and if you - like me - have to work around times where you have to be quiet for your neighbours, helps you prioritize at a glance. I didn't expect it to make that much of a difference, but I managed to catch up on two of the weeklies that had been lagging behind, and move one of my monthlies into the middle of next year. I'm probably not going to be able to catch up all of my stuff till the end of the year, but that's fine. Most of those were for fun or out of personal interest anyway, so I can prioritize around them whenever I have time.
When you don't have to spend time remembering the same list of stuff to do in a day, it turns out that you can do most of them in a fairly short amount of time, and then you can choose to prioritize whatever's more important as you're in the thick of it. This obviously gets easier with concert season encroaching quickly, like every end of the year, but specifically with activities that could take anywhere between 5 Minutes and an hour - reading, for example - becomes somewhat more efficient. Either way, I notice that if I string all of my activities together, I end up spending a frantic, but satisfying 2 hours, which is very manageable even after or around a full workday.
I'm currently using Habitica, because it happens to have the features I need, and the userbase is large enough to assume it won't crash and burn horribly, the same way most of my previous attempts at building a scheduler did. It happens to give you "in-game" (because it is meant to work as a form of game) currency, which helps with budgeting. I was always too lazy to track my spending, because I have yet to find a laptop that I can whip out wherever and do the tracking, and there don't yet exist good spreadsheet apps for mobile phones. Still, it's probably a good habit to have. So far budgeting hasn't been an issue, but it offers a worthwhile mechanic for it, at least until I find the mythical perfect device. Perhaps one of those fancy folding phones, though I seriously doubt it.
At the approximate end of the month, I had most things reconstructed. Learning that in order to write a novel in a month, I just need to cut recreational gaming from my diet, which I don't actually mind at all, leaves me with more confidence to pull more stuff in. I probably shouldn't be gaming in those capacity anyway, so I set up a few more relaxing things on the scheduler, perhaps in the style of Concept Deep Dive, but likely less cerebral, and hence more easy to work on during a commute. Most of these will be things that I do anyway, i.e. media consumption, in some cases in combination with a menial task that I should be doing, but that I haven't, because of the way I hoard data. Either way, it will hopefully result in a cleaner filesystem for stuff like music and movies.