This week was my most unproductive yet. Yet, I’m super happy. I haven’t really accounted for how long I’ve spent doing other, obligatory things. Maybe all of my goals would be possible if I was a machine who min-maxed his time, but I’m not, and I can’t be.
I’m starting to realize that I want my schedule to have more room for spontaneity. If I make a decision to call someone or text someone for an evening instead of working, My plans shouldn’t collapse. Someone’s recently shown me that I need enough room to be happy.
So lets do this goal setting thing for hopefully the last time. This time I’m going to start by considering the time I have to do everything.
First of all, I have to sleep. Let’s pretend I get 8 hours of sleep a night. That leaves us with 16 hours left in the day.
For the first half of the year, I’ll still be in high school. That’s a total of 6.5 hours gone, leaving 9.5 hours still in the day.
I’m in my high school band, which is no small obligation. On average it takes about 1.5 hours away from my day. 8.5 Hours left.
It takes roughly 1.5 hours to travel from school and back. No small amount of time. 7 Hours left.
I want 2 hours of really deep work, focused on my one big goal. 5 hours left.
I want 3 hours to do whatever. To talk to whoever I want whenever I want. 2 hours left.
That is crazy. I’ve been trying to cram all those goals into about 4 hours of work daily. I guess it’s no wonder that I wasn’t able to pull it off.
Those final two hours is where I’ll have to work my less important goals, along with any busy work I may have from school, or tests I have to study for.
Ok, so now that I understand how little time I have, lets cut this list down.
Big Important Longterm Goal: AI Research
It’s an exciting, non mature field already reshaping our world. I want to be apart of that
Less important goals include
So the month of January looks like this now:
A dramatically smaller list right? Hopefully a more achievable one.
This week’s goals
In addition, here are just some fun things I’d like to possibly do in my free time
During the Non-Trivial Fellowship we were required to submit weekly reflections, in which we have to complete a premortem. In a premortem, we try to determine causes of failure before we fail. It was pretty helpful, so I’ll try that again here.
The biggest failure mode is getting sidetracked. I am so easy to distract and one text from the right person is enough for me to drop work and talk for hours. So when doing hard focused work, I have to keep my phone outside the room, and maybe even turned off. I have no other choice. I’ve got 3 hours to do whatever I want without feeling guilty, so I think I’ll be fine.
The next failure mode is getting swamped. School is great at providing large amounts of busy work in the form of homework, tests to study for, and projects to complete. The only way to not spend all of my time on school work is to get as much of it done during the school day as possible. Which means I’ll probably have to engage less with friends.
The final failure mode is that I’m being over ambitious again. A unit of a course meant to take a whole semester is no easy thing to do in one week, but I can always scale back next week.
I know this week’s blog is short, but hopefully next time i’ll have time to write more.
I’ll let you know how it goes.