Time Management

In 2021 I've made much progress in the way of spending time on things that matter and overall spending less time with technology, more on that later. Below you can see my schedule for my days typically with some leniency on time.

Schedule

While these items are set typically throughout my day I make sure to rotate days in which I do home improvement and any creative enveavours. I ensure that I don't have a set timeframe and do them whenever I see fit or when I'm ever feeling bored (more on that later), this way nothing is stale it's more spontanious.

Goals

• Avoid distractions
• Avoid wasting time
• Create tangible results
• Document processes

My main goal with the is to avoid having to give myself reasons to waste time on the computer and focus more on refining my skills or improving something in my life be it gardening to grow food for my family or learning a new language.

The way that I spent most of my time in 2021 was learning; various programming languages, Japanese, and relearning things like music production and video editing, and while these are great I still had no want to really improve and often reached a platou to which then spawned excuses to sit and play games or waste time.

Reasons

The reasoning for doing something like this could be that I witnessed really bad habits from friends and family and want to avoid making the same mistakes. I notice that quite a few people in my life often waste time doing the following in excess;

• Watching TV
• Playing Video Games
• Sitting on social media
• Doing things on their phone

I've often recieved the question "how do you have time for that?" or more often I hear from people "I don't have time for that" to which then you see then play games for 5 hours and sat on their phone until they fell asleep. Priorities. If you change your priorities from consuming to creating or improving you'll notice that you had alot more time than you realized.

Methods

Instead of just explaining why or whatever I'll just list things I do that "saves" me time (ie things your great-grandparents did at my age).

No Phone; I almost never have my phone on my person - something that seems to baffle people. I only have my phone near me if I'm expecting a call from a client, otherwise if it's outside work hours or I'm not near a computer I wont have it on me. If I'm traveling I'll have to take it so if family calls I can answer but even in that instance I leave it in my bag or if by chance I need to use maps to get somewhere I've never been when out.

No TV; I don't watch TV - another thing that seems to confuse people. TV is relegated to times when my wife and I want to watch a movie or if I want to have something on to fall asleep to, other than that I don't watch tv. There of course will be a time when there's a show or something, but if I sit long-term for to watch something I will often work or multi-task while it's on.

Limit Games; I do play games, however I have some caviats: I focus on story driven games ie. anything with a begining and end. If I play a multiplayer game I limit to either playing with friends or until I get my fix which is usually after 30 minutes or so of playing.

Limit Music; This is a surprise considering I'm a musician, but hear me out, give your ears a break and gain inspiration for what's around you. I limit what I listen to now to either my absolute favorites or new artists I find on Bandcamp/Deezer.

Go Outside; I'm moving my priorities and focuses to things that revolve outside, this is something that can be hard since most of my hobbies and work is online, but I'm introducing those inside hobbies outside which then motivates me to work on things outside. I've also started cooking and eating outside as well. Being outside more is so very important I cannot stress this enough because you're bringing yourself closer to nature and are able to relax.

Read More; The best thing I did was put away my phone and computer after work and focus on reading when I have the craving to do something.

Be Bored; THE most important method here is the simplist. This is what people mean when they say Dopamine-Detox which in the real world is called being bored and/or doing something monotonous, something your grandparents and great-grandparents knew all too well. This is a culmination of all the above I've listed, but is something that comes naturally that we for some reason unlearned through the use of distractions and the like.

There seems to be stigma around people that aren't constantly stimulated in some way and perhaps want something to do with their hands or need to feed their dopamine addiction. If you treated the dopamine adicts how people drug addicts I'm sure you'd see the same reactions.

Final

Never say you don't have time to do something, that just means that you're not prioritizing your time to allow you to do the things you want.

Stop wasting time and take the bored-pill, join the anti-dopamine league and be able to accomplish what you want in life.

"Time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away"