Adventures in Time Blocking Week One

One of the huge advantages of working from home is the flexibility it gives you. As you’ll see, my schedule is quite fluid, and how I expected the day to go was rarely how it actually went. I’d like to report I was a publishing machine this week—playing whack-a-mole with jobs as they popped up. Sadly, this would not be completely true as life “happened” regularly.

That Was the Week That Was

Here’s my commentary on the week. While I hope you find this interesting, I’ve also found it tremendously useful. Being able to reflect on what went wrong and right during the week should allow me to plan better in upcoming weeks.

You’ll notice some large gaps in my schedule; some of these are deliberate, as I’ve turned off my family and private calendars. Other gaps are intentional.

(Annoyingly, I thought I'd saved a screenshot of my calender on Monday morning with the intention of comparing it with another screenshot on Friday. It seems I did not).

Monday

I was much more productive in the morning than I had planned. This is a good thing! This meant I managed to free up about an hour and a half in the afternoon for some personal garden-based projects. I much prefer working outside when it is not raining or howling a gale and a ton of gravel doesn’t shift itself.

The huge win for me today was finding someone (the heroic Bart Wynants) to do 5e stat blocking layout. For me, laying out stat blocks is tedious, and I’m delighted to let Bart do it.

Tuesday

Tuesday was a total disaster. The builder turned up with another ton of sand, the piano tuner turned up to tune the piano, the in-laws popped round, and then I had my planned meeting with one of Raging Swan Press’s heroic freelancers. Finally, our new neighbour asked for help moving some rather heavy radiators.

Needless to say, I did not get much done on Tuesday! Still, that’s fine (amor fati). Hopefully, this is the most disrupted day of the week and the rest of the week will be plain sailing.

Wednesday

I had no real plans for Wednesday, as it is the wife’s day off. I had a list of things I’d hoped to get done (mostly from yesterday), but hadn’t planned any specific blocks. Luckily, some time freed itself up in the afternoon and I smashed out everything I’d hoped to accomplish. Wednesday was a good day.

Thursday

Thursday was also a good day, and I managed to achieve everything I’d set out to do. The schedule moved around a bit as I had an early delivery I had to accept—it couldn’t be just dumped on the doorstep—which had a knock-on effect on some of my other timings.

It also rained on Thursday, which affected my dog walking and (another ton of) gravel-shifting plans.

Friday

Energy was low on Friday—particularly after a rather marvellous pastie for lunch. (Curse my no caffeine after 13:00 rule—I really wanted to break it by about 15:00.) In any event, Friday went quite well. Retribution’s Pathfinder 1 stat blocking went better and quicker than expected and another freelancer, Andy Lewis, got cracking with some other stat blocks for the adventure.

Final Thoughts

It’s amazing what you can get done if you plan ahead. That said, there are only so many quality work hours in the day. I do some work—mainly design and development work—much better in the mornings than the afternoon. I need to remember this and start to shift boring admin and the like to the afternoons.

One area I also need to work harder on is email processing. It is very easy to leave my email app open in the background. While I’ve turned off all email notifications except for a handful of VIPs, several times during the week I found myself checking email outside scheduled times. There’s no need for that—particularly when you consider how distracting email is. Email “management” is something I’ll be focusing on more next week.

That’s it for this week. If you want to see another week of my time blocking, perhaps with before and after photos) sign up for a paid Gameatory account and let me know in our exclusive Slack channel.