What time management process do you use for your daily allotment of hours?
The ones not taken up by pre-set obligations like work. Yet, even working in an office, you often have choices about how to structure your day. You’re in charge of time management, aren’t you?
Have you ever approached your day like supper at your favorite restaurant?
Let’s assume that you work forty hours a week for someone other than yourself and optimistically have a half-hour commute. That’s fifty hours a week for work, lunch, and drive time. (Right? I am the pits at math.)
What do you do with your before and after work hours?
There’s a morning menu—
Appetizers can be my favorite part of dining out so being lucky enough to work at home. My first time management step of any day is to write in the mornings. With this being my prime time, I do the bulk of my writing during the early hours. I rise at six to dive into my day, rolling out of bed to my office, opening Scrivener, and working on blogs, articles for Medium, and the second Cosmic Cold Cases of Pittsburgh mystery: Death of Alon Chasdiel.
There’s a spring deadline to get that novel to Jeri B.Walker for editing. She was great to work with on the first one, so I look forward to a repeat collaboration with her.
Late afternoons, my brain starts to get tired, so I move onto the main courses—those entrees that are usually so large I can’t finish them. I quit trying to be largely creative and turn to other aspects of my writing world that can be conquered in small bites. One task is to start querying agents this month for the first mystery: Murder at the Canalucci Creamery. I like to support other bloggers, so I go to my LinkedIn Bloggers Helping Bloggers group and read, comment, and share their blogs. Then I pop over to Medium and catch up with stories and commenters.
Time Management at the End of the Workday
This time is closely followed by time with my husband, and afterwards running errands, the occasional get together with friends, sometimes nothing but reading or watching a show.
Dessert—an super enjoyable part of any meal that I’m often too full to indulge in comes next. With our workdays crammed full of often unchangeable demands, these evening hours are the ones that I’m curious about. Those hours and your weekend hours.
What do you do with them?
How do you fill that time with life-enriching things rather than just use them up?
In the spring, our hours are spent doing yard work—bagging Sweet Gum Tree pods, planting flowers, mowing, weeding, and spraying to keep deer out of the yard so that we can appreciate our blooms. In autumn, we find time between rain drops to cut back or pull out dead flowers, harvest Zinnia seeds for next year’s plantings, and prepare the yard for dormancy.
Then comes the terrible time of winter.
Cold. Snow. Bad roads.
Restlessness and languor put in appearances during these short, darker northern days. I deplore winter. I hate shoveling snow and dread every winter because of it. My much loved mower is parked for four months. The weeds I enjoy yanking out are in deep hiding beneath the frosted soil.
When I lived in the small town of Red Lodge, Montana, road conditions did not trap me in the house—I walked every where, visiting my garage occasionally to start my truck for the sake of making sure it would. In Pittsburgh, the winter roads are often icy and friends live distances away … the phrase “cabin fever” develops a deep personal context.
What do you do to keep your life from stagnating? I spent several years, September through April, attending Community Bible Study, with daily lessons and a weekly meeting. I still do bible studies at home with a friend as a good way to keep my brain—and heart—going forward. For a few years, some friends and I did The Artist’s Way and then continued to meet after we finished the course, challenging the winter blues by working on our creativity in new ways.
By eight in the evening, I’m waning and by ten I’m in bed hoping to stay awake long enough to read several pages of a good book (currently a favorite Bosch novel, The City of Bones) before drifting off to sleep. Some things I can’t read before sleeping, like the D-Day: Battle for Normandy or Unbroken. Those topics are too distressful. Like watching Criminal Minds and then trying to get a good night’s rest.
This winter I have new outdoor gear for walking at lunch time, getting a bit of sunshine on my face without freezing it off (first time for trying a Balaclava). That will help with any after-eating stupor.
Maybe I’ll resume my German lessons and translate this menu or try my hand at crochet once again (which I am not as good at as I am at croquet).
What do you do in the discretionary hours available to you? Do you volunteer? Sew? Woodwork? Have a game night with your spouse or friends? What ways do you keep your brain and body active? How do you choose to interact with other people? How do you keep learning throughout your life?
What are you doing with the other hours—your hours—this winter?
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Read: I spend my hours reading multiple books–at the same time!
I could have sworn I commented on this! I’m pretty sure I spend a lot more of my time doing work related things than I realize! But I love my job, so that is ok. Pretty much from alarm time, work is involved. I wake up(some days it takes longer than others), and then check my voice mail and texts, get attacked by the dogs, feed the dogs and let them outside. I return phone calls and texts, and then hop on FB to check for messages there and then emails. Then I do my get ready for work things, while going back and forth to the computer. For some reason I have to be connected all morning! Later in the day/evening after working, I tend to do more hair things! I read daily tips, trends and ideas, watch videos and sometimes even pull out Madelynn to try a new style! So much of my life revolves around my career!
I guess the rest of my time consists of saving dogs, volunteering, facebooking, and with family. And I enjoy a good sleep, too! Oh and drink hot coffee, and I have recently started drinking hot tea at night! (One of my favorite Jamaica treats!)
Hi ya, Dawn–and I thought I wrote back to this comment from you–what a pair we are this month (the rest of the year we are brilliant, right?).
I love that you love what you do because then you get such enjoyment out of spending your time in all the different aspects of it. That is a total positive–which probably explains why you are such a positive person. Bravo to you.
Love tea–sipping Twinnings Chamomile right now. oh Yum!
I need a hot beverage now, actually! We are entitled to a day of less than brilliance! LOL It happens!
Yes, yes, we are! Makes us shine all the more brightly the rest of the time!
Reframe time…I lived here then moved to AZ and CA and returned several years later. It was so hard for me to become friends with winters again. My blood got so thin that it took literally 14 years to get warm again in temperatures under 75. Now, I look at the winter as half of my life and to be miserable for half of my life is not acceptable to me. So I’ve learned to embrace the winter months. Dressed properly, you can sweat in subzero temperatures. Shoveling snow is the workout I can do in lieu of my other workout indoors. Playing in the snow has made living so much more fun…we cross country ski (there are some beautiful places to do that within a couple miles of our home…Carnegie Park, Settlers Cabin, South Park, etc.), hike, sled ride, toboggan, take walks. Love the other half…makes hot chocolate taste so much better!
Good stuff, Patty. I’ll say it was easier to embrace winter in Montana where some years in started in September and ended in May. Except for when the temperature really plummets, Montana winters are warmer–and always sunnier–than western PA. So I hear you and plan on getting new cross country ski boots this winter so that I can get out on the weekends and take in those wonderful parks.