This entry was inspired by reading an entry over at Daniel Kaine’s site.
Time management is often the bane of my existence. Back when I had a “real job,” I often wished I were a little less…ethical…and felt okay using my downtime at work to work on my novel. However, since I could just see my company saying “hey, you added a comma to your novel during your lunch break but you did it on our computer so we now own the rights to the whole thing,” I, wisely, decided to save the novel for home and work on Alayne’s Story instead.
Now that I’m self-employed, I can decide when I’m going to do what. And that, my friends, often leads me into trouble.
So, how do I manage my time? Well, the last few weeks my own sleeping schedule has been off due to staying up strange hours for an LPI course. Now that I’m finally going to bed (and getting up) at “normal” hours, I generally stick (religiously) to the following schedule:
9 am – 11 am: Cleaning, errands, shower, reading the news
11 am – 1 pm: Working on The Conspiracy
1 pm – 2 pm: Cooking and eating lunch
2 pm – 4 pm: Working on Alayne’s Story with odd breaks to do job searches and applications (I average about 5 of these per day)
4 pm – 6 pm: Working on Midnight of Lanar’ya
6 pm – 10 pm: Break time. I can play WoW, Dragon Age, cook and eat supper, read, whatever.
10 pm – midnight: Working on either MoL or Alayne’s Story.
1 am – 9 am: Sleep (when I can)
I still find myself getting distracted or slacking, though, but I’ve found that assigning a time range for each project helps me stay organized and on-track better. I know that this whole schedule is going to be history soon, once the Conspiracy is unleashed, but I will probably still keep the same principles in play.
And now, it’s closing on midnight so I want to finish off what I was doing in MoL and then get some sleep.
