Day 13 of Digital Minimalism
Because our schedule is so complicated during the school year, my productivity was way down as a failed to use the little bits of time I had between children's activities. That productivity immediately climbed after blocking social media from my phone, but it still wasn't where I needed it to be, especially for software development.
To make good progress, I like to have big, uninterrupted blocks of time for software development. Three hours or more is ideal for me, but that isn't really possible this time of year. Two hours, however, is doable on most days.
Yesterday, I sat down and meticulously planned out my day, marking out the time I would be driving or sitting in the car and assigning tasks to all of that downtime. Today, I simply had to execute the plan. It was fantastic!
- Upon waking: had coffee, visited with family, got dressed for the gym.
- Drove one child to a class and headed to the gym. Decided to meditate for ten minutes in the car before going inside. Most people would probably say that this is not ideal, but it was actually a pretty fun challenge. Did cardio (HIIT) and weights (back). While at the gym, I listened to a recorded talk about Theravada Buddhism. It helpfully explained several concepts on which I was hazy, so I donated a few dollars to the speaker. Every day, I am amazed to live in a golden age when so much knowledge is available at low cost or free. When I left, I worked on some Japanese via audio while driving.
- Picked up child from class, had lunch, visited with family, checked on the kids' homeschooling, and planned out tomorrow in detail.
- Drove one child to sports. On this day, this sport meets for only an hour, so I found a shady spot in the parking lot and worked on my writing. There is a story I would like to finish, and I have many partial drafts of it, but because all the threads were so scattered, I was having trouble getting back into the flow. I took all of the partial drafts and fed them into ChatGPT to talk about organization. ChatGPT is a terrible writer of literature, but it's a great brainstorm and conversation partner for discussing one's work. It sometimes attempted to write drafts of passages. These were laughably bad, but talking through the story structure helped me come up with a solid plan, and I'm ready to go for tomorrow.
- Went home and got in a nice block of software development. A favorable news article came out about a family member, so that was a bit of a distraction, but allowable. You can't plan for every fun, special event that happens.
- Started dinner and took another child to tutoring. This is also only an hour long, so I again found a shady spot in the parking lot. Fifteen minutes was wasted buying a drink because I was thirsty. I looked over the midterm writing prompts for the class I'm taking and continued with Khan Academy's linear algebra.
- Drove back home, ate dinner, and now I am writing this blog post!
- Later tonight, I will spend more time practicing my Japanese.
Now, it's about to be family time. This gets a huge block every night, and that's non-negotiable.
Overall, I'd say that time blocking my day has been a great success. I got in all of the things that I wanted to get in: working out, meditation, software development, my class, linear algebra, Japanese, writing, and even this blog. This would never have happened if I still had social media on my phone. I would be too distracted.
Digital minimalism, even to the limited extent that I am doing it, rules. Looking forward to executing the plan for tomorrow.