I thought I would follow up my recent post about Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals with an examination of my routine. I encountered some challenges that made a replication of Currey’s style impossible so I settled for merely understanding my priorities for scheduling time. In theory, this is as good as the approach Currey used because a careful observer could use my priorities to reconstruct the decisions I made that shaped a given day. This approach fails if my prioritization is imprecise so I’ve tried to consider head-to-head decision as a way of comparing one set of priorities to another. One example of such a comparison is sleep and work – since I set my alarm to wake up for work no matter when I fall asleep, I know work is a priority ahead of sleep.
This approach helped me deal with some of the challenges I’m sure Currey faced in compiling the chapters for Daily Rituals – how to handle the day-to-day variation of a schedule, for example, or whether to settle for a composite description of a series of days rather than simply retelling the events from one ‘average’ day. My set of priorities was the common denominator for all manners of describing my routine because these priorities were my guide for making the many scheduling decisions that structure one day. Therefore, I felt the way I set priorities was more insightful than the actual outcome for any given day.
Here’s what I came up with as my set of priorities for scheduling time:
1. Social time
This is a blanket concept for almost anything I freely choose to do with or for other people. It includes hospice volunteering. My only preference is to avoid any weekend commitments prior to 4pm (but I feel I’ve been reasonably flexible about this preference).
2. Nightly self-care
I stretch every night for between ten and fifteen minutes. I also floss and brush my teeth for about five total minutes. I usually do this right before going to bed.
3. Earning income for meeting expenses
I show up to work on time and leave after at least eight hours.
4. Exercise
I exercise once a day, alternating between easy and hard workouts. My weekday workouts happen right after I wake up but my weekend workout schedule varies based on social commitments. Basketball games happen on weekday nights and I count them as hard workouts. A perfect week would see hard running workouts on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, an easy jog on Sunday, and simple body-weight strength training exercises in my apartment for between ten and twenty minutes on the other three days. If I’m exhausted, injured, or taking a running break, I will substitute a long bike ride for a running workout.
5. Sports on TV
I’ll watch soccer or the NFL using my antenna to access free TV. Streaming is not an option due to my lack of internet access. I will go to a bar for certain soccer or NBA playoff games.
6. Sleep
My goal is to sleep for between seven and eight hours. Ideally, I go to bed between 10 and 11 and wake up around 6. If I sleep less than seven hours on a given night, I’ll try to make up for lost sleep the next day.
7. Grocery shopping and laundry
A tie! I go to Haymarket late Saturday morning for vegetables and salmon. Laundry is every other week, usually on a weekend morning.
8. Writing
My goal is to average at least ninety minutes of writing per day. Writing includes writing (glad I can clear this up) as well as proofreading, taking notes from books, and computer admin associated with TOA. I do most of this before I start the rest of the day but I will make an effort to squeeze in writing time elsewhere if my average falls below ninety minutes per day.
9. Reading
My monthly reading goal is six books. I suspect my books average around 250 pages but I’ve never counted words. I read while on transit, when I’m home for the night, and in public whenever I’m killing time between commitments. If I’m off the pace, I’ll block additional time to catch up, including changing my traveling decisions to use transit instead of biking to my various destinations.
10. Eating
I generally eat small snacks right after I wake up and in the late morning before having proper meals in mid afternoon and the evening. I eat as many vegetables as possible and cook these in big batches that I draw from over the ensuing few days. If I ever eat way too much at one sitting, I try to fast for at least the next sixteen to twenty hours.
11. Internet admin
I use work or library computers to complete internet-dependent tasks such as answering email, completing life admin, and entertaining myself. I schedule most of this to prevent myself from overindulging (news websites once a week, for example). I schedule using target start dates (‘track spending on the 12th’) but include wiggle room to account for busyness. I limit internet admin to around two hours per day and probably average about one hour per day.
Final thoughts
I wrote some extended insights into my exercise and internet routines that I will revisit in upcoming leftover posts. I also wrote down exactly what I did for a given one week period – April 5 through April 11 – and I will share that in another leftover post as a way to test the principles I’ve described today.
I’d like to wrap up by stressing the important role sleep played in this project. It was very easy to categorize my priorities by whether I would wake up early for them or not. Simply put, what I set alarm clocks for were obviously higher priority than sleep while whatever I skipped in order to sleep in was a clear lower priority. Once I split the list into those two groups, I could compare the items among each other and determine how I prioritized my time.
