Managing My "Free" Time

It's getting toward the end of the year, and that means it's time to start thinking about the next one. I thought I'd shift gears a little bit and tell you about how I do project management. My hobbies are a fair amount of work and there's nobody *making* me do it, so it's my job to keep myself organized and motivated. Some goal-setting helps with maintaining steady progress.

I still end up with time for the occasional random project done on a whim, which is unfortunate, because now the WAU is infecting my house. 

I typically plan for one year at a time. Some people try to have five-year goals and such, but I've found it difficult to see farther than one year ahead - why should start becoming apparent as I get into the details. So I'm mulling the idea of trying to sketch out longer-term plans, but haven't done so up to this point.

I start by blocking out how much time I'm going to have. I assign time in units of weeks, and there are four weeks per month. If any month has a fifth week, that's an "elastic week" that I can use for anything I feel like at the time; I don't assign tasks to it. I also don't assign anything in June and December, to provide myself with time for socializing around summer vacation and the big year-end holidays. So that gives me 40 weeks a year to play with.

The recent pattern I've settled into has been 20 weeks for Acuitas, 10 weeks for robotics, and 10 weeks for writing. And each month gets two Acuitas weeks, one robotics week, and one writing week. Rotating between hobbies helps relieve mental fatigue, reduces disappointment if one of them isn't going well at the moment, and gives me a better mix of output to share with my audience (some of whom might primarily follow me for one topic).

Next I have to break up my projects into tasks or phases that I think will take about a week to do. This is easiest for writing; one week yields one novel chapter (5000-6000 words), one short story, or multiple chapters of editing. I don't really get "writer's block" and can reliably produce that much in a week's spare time. Where AI and robotics are concerned, I often have a very poor idea of how long those tasks are going to take. Mechanical design goals, for example, *might* only demand that I fabricate the parts once ... but frequently the first prototype doesn't work out. And the AI is being built from scratch, by a person walking through the dark with a lamp that only shows a few feet in front of her. I have no idea what I'm doing. And that makes schedule projections difficult.

Which is why, when I'm executing these schedules later, I give myself an out. To complete a task "on time," I have to either finish the task, or do at least ten hours of work on it. If I hit ten hours and it's nowhere near done, I'm allowed to push the schedule. The remainder of that task falls into the next week, and some later task I'd planned to do this year gets scratched off the list. On the other side of the coin, I try to have some "stretch goals" in my back pocket in case work gets done faster than expected (ha ha, like that ever happens), or I have room to work during an elastic week, or I have spare vacation days to burn.

I typically add at least one more column to the schedule, and that's for home and yard maintenance: one task per month, or less, related to either routine work or repairing something broken.

Part of this year's schedule spreadsheet, mostly filled out. Color coding indicates how close to on-time tasks were completed. It doesn't look quite the same as it did at the beginning of the year. "Repair Fence" was added rather abruptly. Many robotics tasks got pushed off the list when ACE took longer than expected.

Once the plan is done, I track my progress as the year goes by. I note when I finish each task and whether or not I met its deadline. I also log the number of hours invested in each type of work I do: both the scheduled hobby tasks, and others. Yes, I have a spreadsheet for this, and it's a lot like my timesheet for the day job. I put down the number of hours for each project on each day, and the sheet calculates weekly and yearly totals. 

Here's where another little goal comes in: I try to achieve a 3:1 (or greater) ratio between Creation work and Maintenance work.

The real defining factor here is not how "creative" the work is, but whether, when it is finished, it gives me some asset I didn't have before - whether that be new knowledge, new digital content, or a new object. "Maintenance" is work that, once done, only has to be done again. It's time spent fighting entropy - a tax paid to futility, since this is a fight I will eventually lose. So when the creation:maintenance ratio is high, I'm in a state of growth. If it's low, I'm burning most of my energy just treading water. Three is a completely arbitrary number, but it makes me feel good and is achievable with effort, which provides the right incentive to push.

To get more specific, Creation tasks include all the aforementioned hobby projects, as well as blogging, artwork, and technical study. Maintenance covers food preparation, housecleaning, journaling, laundry, yard work, financial business, repairs, etc. Then there's a third category, Volunteer, which covers work primarily done for others. This includes actual community volunteering but also political activism and voting, church service, making or buying gifts, and so forth. I don't enforce a ratio between this category and the other two; I just do things as there's need or opportunity.

The 3:1 ratio incentivizes me to do both more Creation and less Maintenance. Even if pulling Maintenance down doesn't directly improve Creation, it gives me more time to recharge. A certain amount of Maintenance simply has to be done, but if I'm not hitting the target, I start taking a harder look at what's essential. I decide I can live with a dirty kitchen or tolerate more weeds in the yard. Because what is the meaning of that stuff, really? I actually had to stop including exercise under Maintenance because ... while technically, it is ... that was proving too much of an incentive to *not* exercise. So now I make a point of only doing exercise that has some fun value (e.g. going on walks), and treat it as recreation.

There are other quirks to how I keep my books. Transportation time to any activity is not counted, because though it expends time, it doesn't expend my real limiting factor: mental energy. If I multitask - fabricating something while watching TV, for example - I only log half of the actual time spent, while the other half goes to recreation.

I mentioned that a 1-week hobby task is capped at about 10 hours. Once I add in everything else, a good week of work totals about 16 hours. If I hit 20+ hours, that's a great week. Don't forget I'm working a full-time job too! At the end of the year, the tracking gives me a way to see what I prioritized, which tasks hogged more time than they deserved, and how I did compared to previous years.

I've tried various incentive structures in hopes of making myself more productive. For example, "I can buy myself an extra music album or restaurant meal if I log at least X hours this month." I used Habitica for a while. But eventually I stopped, because it wasn't helping. The satisfaction of putting hours into my spreadsheet and hitting goals seems to be motivation enough, and when I'm tapped out, I'm done - no reward will persuade me to keep working. Connecting my money budget to my time budget was also hindering ideal management of the money, and the additional record-keeping was becoming a chore in its own right. So, although I suppose this kind of thing works for some people, it didn't work for me.

Which brings me to the final point of the post, which is that *you* might find some of these ideas useful for your own planning; I present them as inspiration. But if you find that they don't click for you, don't use them. Every brain is a little different, and it's your job to figure out how to trick your own particular brain into doing what you want.

Until the next cycle,

Jenny