Over the weekend, rather than a new year’s resolution, I came up with a formula to break my day into pieces, by task, and hopefully boost my efficiency. My goals for this year are to spend my weekday workdays (starting at 7 a.m. and continuing through 10 pm, with lots of breaks for meetings, eating, outdoor time, cooking, relaxing, spending time with family members, etc.) approximately like this:
- Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
- My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
- Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
- Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
- Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
- Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
- Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
- Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)
Well, this is pretty cool for day #1: my actual breakdown, with an hour and a half left to go looks like this:
- Work for paying clients: 63 minutes (need to improve tomorrow)
- My own writing, research, and marketing: 62 minutes including writing this post
- Processing e-mail: 124 minutes
- Participating in social media: 42 minutes (need to cut back a bit until the other work is done)
- Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 65 minutes, partly because I have a very early tax appointment this year, so for the next couple of weeks this is going to get more attention, and partly because it took me 20 minutes to track down an error in the spreadsheet I was working on
- Office and household organizing and cleaning: 75 minutes, mostly organizing three weeks of trash for a dump run—tomorrow I hope to spend the quota on my office
- Professional reading: 31 minutes
- Physical exercise: 45 minutes with the dog walk, and 20 minutes on my exercycle coming later
I am realistic. I know that life happens, and I won’t be exact. But I’m pretty pleased—and I know that I’m going to spend the next half hour on professional reading, and come in very close on everything except client work. I don’t generally do client work at night, because my clients should get my best thinking, and that’s in daylight.
