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Summer routine -- advice?
Dan Grover | May 30 2006
This summer will be a unique opportunity for me. I'll have finished high school, I'll still be living with my folks (i.e. free rent, food), and I'll have lots of time to work on constructive things and have fun. I don't know why this has never occured to me before during any other summer, but it has now. The major focus of my efforts this summer will be: 1) working on my software business and freelance jobs that come up, 2) learning several topics I'm interested in and reading an assload of books, 3) maintaining a completely consistent exercise routine and losing weight. 4) community service This is pretty ambitious, but I figure this is a unique opportunity to accomplish some great stuff. In past summers, I've worked on projects that have turned out well, but spent most of my time at a summer job. So this will be great if I can get my ass in gear and set up a routine. Anyway, my challenge now is trying to figure out a routine for this. I've figured I ought to get up at some painfully early hour every day and start to work, give myself a lunch break, etc. But in many ways, treating it like a 9-5 would suck, because it might make me not only waste time, but waste my own time, which is even worse. One idea I've had mild success with in the midst of the usual senioritus is insisting to myself that I engage in some kind of "constructive activity" -- homework, organizing, reading, journaling, whatever. So I was thinking I ought to schedule periods of that, and then have a "credit" system sort of like that Printable CEO guy has. So I'm posting, asking for some advice here, because I figure a good portion of people here have been in the situation (eg freelancers, writers) of having a lot of completely blank days and having to make them worthwhile. Your thoughts? 8 Comments
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 I've graduated and all that...Submitted by nuttdan on June 25, 2006 - 11:21pm.
I've graduated and all that jazz and have started working. I made a chart thingy on my whiteboard to see how many hours I worked. First week didn't go so well, only a total of 19 hours. This week was much better with a total of 36 hours, plus I resumed my exercise routine and read a bunch, even did an emergency redesign of my personal site. I count "work" as anything constructive (client work, reading, working on my business, exercising, organizing). I use a few different colors to denote what kind of "work" I was doing. The loose definition is basically to give myself incentive to do *something* other than sit around, and because things I do count do relate reasonably well to what I want to accomplish by the end of the summer. (Example: with exercising, by the end of the summer, I can arrive at college merely an annoying learning disabled kid, not a fat annoying learning disabled kid.) I've had a great amount of trouble in establishing a sleep routine. I've at least gotten up before noon every day, but the days when I don't sleep through the alarm, I'm pretty groggy and unproductive for the rest of the day. And sometimes I get tired at around the time I should in the evening and go to bed expecting to wake up the next morning refreshed and ready to do stuff....and it ends up being more a siesta and I'm up all night trying to sleep. I need to go read Steve Pavlina's article again. And a few times I've gotten this dreaded feeling. You know it, I'm sure: eyes out of focus, mentally tired but perfectly alert, fully conscious of what needs to be done, but with no ability to focus. I felt like that today for a while, then I realized that when I got it during studying, I had a handy remedy in the form of a list in my back pocket. In short, I've gotten off to a rocky start, but I really haven't felt better in quite a while. I'm tremendously motivated in everything I do now, especially now that I have the time to dig into stuff. I just need to develop the techniques and/or procure the caffeine to get it done before the summer closes. :) » POSTED IN:
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