Time Blocking

Hey all,

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone had a restful break and connected just that little bit more with your friends, family, or any strangers you might've met at the table this year. It's always good to maintain those relationships.

Anyway, this Thanksgiving, I've been relaxing a lot, and it has spurred me to think more about what productivity means at a time when you don't have any responsibilities from school or work. Because, what happened over my Thanksgiving break is that I had a vague sense that I had things I wanted to do, but I instead opted to reconnect with my friends and play video games (probably an excessive amount.)

This isn't necessarily a "wrong" decision, but I feel like I could've split my time better between relaxation and working on whatever things I "should" be doing, so that's what I'm talking about today.

Now, I've been dancing around this topic of 'what work you "should be doing"' for a couple of weeks now, especially with my posts on "Efficiencies" and "Rat Races," where I kind of mention that school and work are tasks with diminishing returns.

Luckily, I feel I've done a pretty good job of managing my work time since then. I can feel myself gaining free time by making my time in classes or doing classwork more efficient and focused. However, I've realized that leisure activities are filling that free time more often than my "productive" (but still fun) activities are, and I think it has something to do with how I've mentally set up my long and short-term goals.

Right now, I have these goals more as ideas or almost "themes" I want to work toward, but (at least for my short-term goals) I haven't blocked out time to work on each thing or set deadlines to hit each goal.

For example, one of my major life goals/themes is that I want to do "extra stuff" outside of school or a future job, but I've found I like saying, "It's naptime" than saying, "Oh, I'll work on this project for an hour or two."

If all goes well, time blocking like this will lend me these advantages:

1. I'll feel more accountable for missing work time or making my work time inefficient because I had specific (albeit flexible) goals for each work session.
2. I'll be able to use feedback loops in my life:
   1. For example, blocking out time to learn how to study more efficiently will lead to having more time to block out for other things (because I'm learning more efficiently), and so on.
3. I won't be able to sacrifice things I need. If I'm not getting enough sleep or going to the gym enough, that's likely an inefficiency on my part, not because my schedule is too packed (up to interpretation, of course.)
4. I can schedule and adjust my work-life balance for my mental and physical health.

Still, I'm aware that time-blocking can make your life feel pretty robotic, so I'm working on finding a balance between giving myself wiggle room to hang out with friends or do spontaneous activities and blocking out enough time to cover all my goals.

Anyway, that's all for today. I hope this post taught you something meaningful, helped you reevaluate your current school/work schedule, or helped you identify some inefficiency in your life that's making you unhappy. If it did, reply to this email and let me know!

As always, thanks for reading, and have a great week!

-Ethan