Time

[mmerriam]

A question for all my gentle readers.

How do you prioritize your time?

If you are one of the writers on my friends list tell me how you make sure that you get your allotted daily writing time in. How do you manage to not lose precious writing time to the daily things that must get done, such as laundry, eating, and dealing with the myriad stuff that crops up? Do you just give yourself permission to let things go until you've applied butt to chair for at least X amount of time?

If you are not a writer, then tell me what methods you use to prioritize time to make sure you actually get to have some fun (whatever that might be to you) once in awhile. We know that all work and no play leads to running around a haunted hotel while chasing your family with an axe. Since none of you have reached that point, you must able to relax somehow.

In other news, tomorrow at school I'm going to tell Lynn that I plan to start dropping classes, and re-arrange my schedule. It is my hope that the extra couple of hours saved every day will ease the scheduling stress, and will help both careswen and I sleep better.

Comments

[williamofoccam.livejournal.com]

I'm, what's that phrase... pretty super hypersensitive list and goal oriented type of person. Does it mean that I don't have trouble balancing stuff? Of course not, I just get all stressed up about it, but that's a different topic. Here's what I did, and do occasionally again because it makes me feel better. But just a warning I'm a list oriented person.

Often I'll list out things that I need/want to do and group them by 'fun or by choice' and 'need or should do'. Knowing that life is full of surprises these lists need to be kept somewhere I can find them again later.

I then go through the lists and figure out what things off the need are most important right now. Sometimes I number them for importance sometimes not. I know, how whimsical. Then I do the same with the fun list.

I'll use the lists as reminders in a prominent location, or I'll make plans for the week/month to do specific list things. If I'm having a hard time I'll make my projections into the future shorter like planning only a couple days in advance.

The reason to review the list is because there is never enough time to do everything right now, so pick what's important right now. If there are large life changes choose new items to reflect what's important. Working on what's important to you leaves little room for regret because you were doing what you thought was important.

If it's simply the balance between work and fun I try to figure out what things I can combine. Like working on live journal while doing laundry, which in my case the computer is in the basement so I can easily make that work.

I look at my habits and se where I'm wasting time and figure out what I could be doing with that time. If you're a big TV watcher break down the shows that you're watching and question if it or something else is more important to you. Or you could get down to looking at what fun things give you the biggest buzz with the least amount of time spent... or you can ramble like a psychology undergrad who thinks pavlov's dog and behavior modification are the most fascinating things under the sun.

I've got other thoughts but I think I've put too much into this one entry already. In short treat time like money. You only have so much of it to spend. What do you HAVE TO spend it on, and then what do you WANT to spend it on?