I’ve always thought about how crazy it is that most of us spend 8 hours working. Plus the commute. Depending where you live, it’s what? 9 or 10 hours? that’s ~40% of our day! And you also need to sleep and eat.
Of course, I know that everyone has a different reality. Some people need to do it because of a reason e.g they have a family. But in my case I don’t.
Luckily I really like my current job and I work remotely so I don’t even need to commute. That’s why I’m not thinking about this so often like before. But still the concept that life is finite and time passes by triggers me some anxiety/FOMO.
One of the things I like the most is learning. There are so many things I want to learn, do and experience. Usually I think I don’t have the time. But I started thinking about my day and if that’s true. I’m not really organized or have a specific goal. It’s just 15 open tabs with stuff I want to read and see. So ok, that’s definitely a problem. How can I start to solve it?
Objectives
I thought about my macro objectives. In my case those are:
- Become a better engineer.
- Get fit.
- Enjoy nature (I’m currently living in Koh Tao).
TODO List
I wrote a list with stuff I want to do/learn and assigned priorities. For example, I love Carl Sagan and I started reading Cosmos a while ago but it’s hard for me to find the time to do it. Also, I want to learn about AI and Machine Learning. I have some courses and books about that but never started them. And a lot of other things. But I think is important to focus in 1 or 2 things tops. After completing an item, remove it from the queue and start with the next one.
Organize
I created a spreadsheet to plan my day. Assigning a specific task to each hour in order to have time to go to boxing, to the beach, learn, work and sleep.
Avoid distractions
I need to stop spending time in things that don’t really matter. Social networks are the worst. In my case Twitter, YouTube and Hacker News consume more time that I would like to admit. These are some things I did to avoid that:
- Installed gofuckingwork Chrome extension to block Twitter.
- Enabled iOS 12 screen time and set a specific amount of time for social media. There must be something similar for Android.
- HIDE YOUTUBE SUGGESTIONS. I use uBlock but you can do it with Adblock Plus too.
I started doing this only a few days ago. It’s not being easy but so far I’ve been using social media for “only” ~40 minutes per day and reading/learning a lot more than before.
