Schedules and Routines, II
Jan. 31st, 2008 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ewtMany thanks to those of you who replied to this post about schedules and routines. If you missed it, I'm still interested. If you'd rather not say in a public post then do e-mail me instead.
The reason I'm interested is that I'm currently in the process of trying to build routines that work well for me. I have a lot of things that really ought to be done every day, a lot of conflicting interests and side-projects I'd like to spend more time on, rather variable abilities due to physical and mental health issues (yes, keeping better routines will eventually help the variation in abilities to go down some, but that's a chicken-egg problem), and a variable academic schedule that can see me required at rehearsal anytime from 09.30 to 22.00 at relatively short notice.
Things I would, ideally, do every weekday include:
-healthy, nutritious, un-rushed home-made breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, and all the washing-up that those entail; probably a good 2 hours there including prep time, eating and cleanup, given lack of dishwasher and requirement for food to contain fresh veg and be moderately interesting.
-sit in front of the light box, or outside
-writing Morning Pages (3 pages, longhand; I've not been able to do this since September 2006 due to damage to my elbow, I simply can't write for that long without pain and typing doesn't seem to work nearly as well for me, but if I could it would be about 45 minutes)
-Ki-Aikido warm-up (15 minutes, though it can be done faster I prefer to take some time over it)
-physio (ideally 45 minutes to an hour)
-take meds (yes, I have enough of these I have to schedule time for taking them. I can only swallow so fast.)
-basic hygiene (brush teeth, wash face, braid hair so it doesn't bug me, morning and night; about 15 minutes a go, although it will get faster with practise))
-at least 2 hours of horn practise
-at least an hour of non-playing academic work
-at least an hour outside (NOT the same as lightbox stuff; outside is importnat to me for more reasons than just the daylight. Also, if it's en route to anywhere, it doesn't count if I'm carrying a backpack, and it doesn't count if I'm in a hurry.)
-attend all classes/rehearsals/appointments from Trinty, Aikido, teaching and medical stuff
-some time spent keeping in touch with partners, family and friends
-getting my room to a baseline tidiness level where there is nothing on the floor and projects are put away. If I don't do this regularly enough I will eventually descend into a Pit of Chaos; a week is too long so it goes on the daily list.
-sort and file post
-catch up on LJ to skip="100" (I don't go further back than that and really ought to get back to using a "time-pressed" reading list when I'm pressed for time but want to keep in touch with some people a little better; I've been missing things a lot recently).
-keep up with and respond to online community stuff I'm involved in
-deal with any e-mails that have come in during the day
-make any phonecalls that need to be made
-log finances
-review next day's schedule
-set out clothes for next day (if I don't set them out then I've forgotten by morning, and clothing decisions in the mornings are not a good idea)
-some time working on tasks that fall under the 'weekly' heading and are general self-care or life-maintenance activities (things like laundry, banking, hair-washing, reviewing my schedule, mending, ironing, watering the plants, getting some of my old crap up on eBay, and the like, some of these will need to be done more than once a week but daily would definitely be too often); there's quite a lot of this.
-do a bit of writing for one or the other of my more public blogs
-spend an hour or two working on interesting side-projects (sewing new things, foraging, learning new cooking techniques, not-for-Trinty composition, and so on)
It's 2 hours to travel to Trinity and back; most of my evenings are booked (Monday and Thursday are Aikido, Wednesday is teaching, Tuesday is socialstuffs, Friday is variable but very often a QNI or time spent with a partner). I aim to get to Trinity around 8am because then I can book a practise room for 2 hours and get that out of the way at the start of the day, but that means I need to leave at 7am, and that's difficult. What time I get home depends on when my last commitment is; if I can, I go home between daytime and evening things, since I live closer to evening things than to Trinity, but sometimes that's not possible. My academic schedule varies a lot.
So, I'm unlikely to get my 'ideal' in, at least not until my mental and physical fitness improve a lot or my academic commitments change.
I struggle, when I don't do everything I'd like to, to get anything done at all. This is not good.
I need to sort out an absolute baseline - if I'm having a bad pain day or a bad brain day or things have been busier than normal, there are things I still must do, things that are absolutely not negotiable. For weekdays, these are:
-eat at least 3 meals that include protein and vegetables
-take meds
-do at least 15 minutes of physio
-if it's winter, do at least 30 minutes of lightbox
-practise for at least an hour
-attend all classes/rehearsals/appointments from Trinty, Aikido, teaching and medical stuff
-brush teeth and hair at least once (washing face and braiding hair can suffer if I'm that rushed)
-spend at least 30 minutes on WeeklyStuff as described in previous list.
Perhaps if I start with that as baseline, and view everything else as a desirable bonus, it will be easier.
A major difficulty for me at the moment: I can't really afford to be buying ready-made food, I often don't have the time to cook properly, and I have very little in the way of freezer space for pre-made things. If I have an extended busy period then healthy and quick things like fresh fruit and veg just go off unless I buy them every few days which becomes problematic in terms of the time it takes, and it becomes even more important that what I do eat (pre-made) is good for me. For a while cold tins of beans filled an important gap here (could keep some in my locker at Trinity, they have protein and fibre if rather more sugar than I'd like) but I over-relied on them and have gone off tinned beans entirely now. I'd love to do something like once-a-month cooking but I'd need a deep freeze, and where exactly am I going to put one of those?
The reason I'm interested is that I'm currently in the process of trying to build routines that work well for me. I have a lot of things that really ought to be done every day, a lot of conflicting interests and side-projects I'd like to spend more time on, rather variable abilities due to physical and mental health issues (yes, keeping better routines will eventually help the variation in abilities to go down some, but that's a chicken-egg problem), and a variable academic schedule that can see me required at rehearsal anytime from 09.30 to 22.00 at relatively short notice.
Things I would, ideally, do every weekday include:
-healthy, nutritious, un-rushed home-made breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, and all the washing-up that those entail; probably a good 2 hours there including prep time, eating and cleanup, given lack of dishwasher and requirement for food to contain fresh veg and be moderately interesting.
-sit in front of the light box, or outside
-writing Morning Pages (3 pages, longhand; I've not been able to do this since September 2006 due to damage to my elbow, I simply can't write for that long without pain and typing doesn't seem to work nearly as well for me, but if I could it would be about 45 minutes)
-Ki-Aikido warm-up (15 minutes, though it can be done faster I prefer to take some time over it)
-physio (ideally 45 minutes to an hour)
-take meds (yes, I have enough of these I have to schedule time for taking them. I can only swallow so fast.)
-basic hygiene (brush teeth, wash face, braid hair so it doesn't bug me, morning and night; about 15 minutes a go, although it will get faster with practise))
-at least 2 hours of horn practise
-at least an hour of non-playing academic work
-at least an hour outside (NOT the same as lightbox stuff; outside is importnat to me for more reasons than just the daylight. Also, if it's en route to anywhere, it doesn't count if I'm carrying a backpack, and it doesn't count if I'm in a hurry.)
-attend all classes/rehearsals/appointments from Trinty, Aikido, teaching and medical stuff
-some time spent keeping in touch with partners, family and friends
-getting my room to a baseline tidiness level where there is nothing on the floor and projects are put away. If I don't do this regularly enough I will eventually descend into a Pit of Chaos; a week is too long so it goes on the daily list.
-sort and file post
-catch up on LJ to skip="100" (I don't go further back than that and really ought to get back to using a "time-pressed" reading list when I'm pressed for time but want to keep in touch with some people a little better; I've been missing things a lot recently).
-keep up with and respond to online community stuff I'm involved in
-deal with any e-mails that have come in during the day
-make any phonecalls that need to be made
-log finances
-review next day's schedule
-set out clothes for next day (if I don't set them out then I've forgotten by morning, and clothing decisions in the mornings are not a good idea)
-some time working on tasks that fall under the 'weekly' heading and are general self-care or life-maintenance activities (things like laundry, banking, hair-washing, reviewing my schedule, mending, ironing, watering the plants, getting some of my old crap up on eBay, and the like, some of these will need to be done more than once a week but daily would definitely be too often); there's quite a lot of this.
-do a bit of writing for one or the other of my more public blogs
-spend an hour or two working on interesting side-projects (sewing new things, foraging, learning new cooking techniques, not-for-Trinty composition, and so on)
It's 2 hours to travel to Trinity and back; most of my evenings are booked (Monday and Thursday are Aikido, Wednesday is teaching, Tuesday is socialstuffs, Friday is variable but very often a QNI or time spent with a partner). I aim to get to Trinity around 8am because then I can book a practise room for 2 hours and get that out of the way at the start of the day, but that means I need to leave at 7am, and that's difficult. What time I get home depends on when my last commitment is; if I can, I go home between daytime and evening things, since I live closer to evening things than to Trinity, but sometimes that's not possible. My academic schedule varies a lot.
So, I'm unlikely to get my 'ideal' in, at least not until my mental and physical fitness improve a lot or my academic commitments change.
I struggle, when I don't do everything I'd like to, to get anything done at all. This is not good.
I need to sort out an absolute baseline - if I'm having a bad pain day or a bad brain day or things have been busier than normal, there are things I still must do, things that are absolutely not negotiable. For weekdays, these are:
-eat at least 3 meals that include protein and vegetables
-take meds
-do at least 15 minutes of physio
-if it's winter, do at least 30 minutes of lightbox
-practise for at least an hour
-attend all classes/rehearsals/appointments from Trinty, Aikido, teaching and medical stuff
-brush teeth and hair at least once (washing face and braiding hair can suffer if I'm that rushed)
-spend at least 30 minutes on WeeklyStuff as described in previous list.
Perhaps if I start with that as baseline, and view everything else as a desirable bonus, it will be easier.
A major difficulty for me at the moment: I can't really afford to be buying ready-made food, I often don't have the time to cook properly, and I have very little in the way of freezer space for pre-made things. If I have an extended busy period then healthy and quick things like fresh fruit and veg just go off unless I buy them every few days which becomes problematic in terms of the time it takes, and it becomes even more important that what I do eat (pre-made) is good for me. For a while cold tins of beans filled an important gap here (could keep some in my locker at Trinity, they have protein and fibre if rather more sugar than I'd like) but I over-relied on them and have gone off tinned beans entirely now. I'd love to do something like once-a-month cooking but I'd need a deep freeze, and where exactly am I going to put one of those?
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 08:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 09:55 am (UTC)Hence earlier posts about PLNs for later involving moving to Leytonstone where most of my friends are, as close as possible to where they live. Even if we were in separate houses it would make more sense for one house to have a big deep freeze than for two houses to have smaller ones.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 11:19 am (UTC)So, um, I think that you're expecting too much of yourself. Even if you weren't at Trinity, that's a very very full daily schedule.
Looking at that, I'd say that the obvious places to cut back are:
- Cut LJ reading, and maybe online communities, down dramatically (skip=100 is a lot!). Some of the online communities may be work- or other-future relevant; are there any that aren't?
- Consider whether the blog-writing & the interesting side-projects are a useful use of time while you also have the college commitments.
- Can outside-time happen less often than daily?
- Can clothes-sorting be batched less often than daily? (e.g. do all clothes for next week on a Sunday & hang them on hangers)
The baseline list looks much more like a reasonable schedule :-) Would it help to have a second-line list, as it were, that's in between the "ideal" list & the baseline? Since you sometimes have prioritising problems, doing the prioritising in advance might be good.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 11:40 am (UTC)I don't have 4 hours of classes at Trinity most days; I do sometimes have up to 10 hours of rehearsal and performance, but not often.
I'm thinking of re-instating a "pressed for time" default reading list on LJ. The biggest time-saving there would be that there wouldn't be any rss feeds on it, which are interesting and I do want to keep most of them but seldom need to be read right away.
Some of the blog-writing dovetails nicely with the Trinty commitments and it would help me to do more of it. I'm wondering about trying to do some on the train in the mornings and evenings; I usually get a seat and I'm already carrying paper. If I were to write a rough outline while travelling then the actual typing part wouldn't take long at all. The question there is whether my elbow will suffer from all the writing; I want to look into whether it's possible to get a splint for the base of my fourth finger on my right hand, as that joint is particularly unstable and seems to exacerbate things a lot.
Interesting side-projects definitely need to be kept in perspective, but I've just let go of a load of them (got rid of b0rkened spinning wheel, getting rid of loom and raw fleece, no longer have a garden) and I'd like to take some time to adapt to that before I get rid of any more.
I'd really like outside-time to happen daily if it can because I do find it very restorative. It doesn't necessarily have to be an hour, though. When the weather is warmer I can combine it with eating my lunch.
Doing all clothes for a week probably won't work because I don't always know at the start of the week what my academic schedule will be and hence whether I'll need things like concert dress, so even if I batch my clothes at the beginning of the week I still need to check my schedule each night for the next day's clothing requirements. I've previously thought about having 7 outfits and just assigning one to each weekday, which would work well as a default option but might get a bit boring. It also doesn't allow me to adapt much to the weather, which is annoying, but then I usually just throw on a sweater if it's cold or remove a layer if it's hot and the summer clothes would be different than the winter clothes anyway... hmm. Worth thinking about this more, I think.
For now I'm going to stick to the baseline list for a while and try to get it firmly established, see what the state of my life is after a week or so and then prioritise things from the 'ideal' list and begin adding them.
I suspect that some of the first things to add will be making more of my own food (emergency baseline allows me to buy it ready-made as long as it has protein and veg but this is rather unsustainable financially) and getting some daily tidying in.