Energy Management

I need to find a better way to manage my energy levels. I have managed to organise the random ideas I have into some semblance of order so that I can start making some progress on them and still no progress has been made.

The main problem seems to be that when I have the time, I don’t have the energy. I have many ideas and am deeply envious of the type of people that have the time and the energy to follow up on their ideas. Some annoy me as they seem to make a living with freelance projects and have managed to have sufficient income from this to indulge their creative desires. This annoys me because I don’t think I can do that with all the additional commitments for mortgages and kids and a list of things that drink money faster than I seem to be able to earn it. As such I work earning as much as I can and when I do have the time to sit down in front of the computer to start on one of my many outstanding projects I barely have the energy to reply to a few simple e-mails, never mind work out how to generate complex geometrical compositions from programmatic interactions of basic geometric figures.

All of these people that I am envious of can’t be that lucky though. Some quite clearly have other jobs and families and still manage to find the time and the energy to pursue their dreams. This gives me some hope that there is a way to find a way of properly aligning the times when I can make space for some of my pet projects and the times when I have good energy levels.

I thought some late evening work would be good but I am not the night owl I used to be any more and there are too many distractions available until the small hours of the morning (TV on or off there are others in the house and the nagging feeling that I should go to bed cos I need to be up in the morning just conspires against me). The next thing to try is to get up in the morning before any one else, before I need to get to work and try and get at least half an hour on one project while I have my morning coffee. Not sure if it is going to work at all as I am notoriously bad at getting up in the morning unless I have to (mainly due to staying up all night watching crap on the telly half asleep) but I think it is worth a try.

Experiments in Organisation

I always seem to be coming back to the issue of not having enough time to do the things that I want to do. I used to read books, write more code, generally I felt more creative too. These days I am lucky if I read a book a year and coding outside of work is non-existent despite many small projects which really excite me being queued up on the computer almost ready to go.

So I stopped and looked at what I was doing and found that I was reading but it was mostly on-line and not always that useful or even interesting. I was spending upwards of two hours a day reading little bits of random information from various sites around the net. Fortunately one of those sites was LifeHacker which has some interesting hints and info on being organised. I have been half reading a book on a similar topic (Why am I so disorganised? by Dr Maryliyn Paul) but as mentioned earlier never seem to have the time to read it properly.

Two points really stuck out as things that I could try and do. The first was to go off-line to try and get things done (Know When You Should Unplug from the Internet) and the second was that sometimes simple pen and paper lists can be more effective than electronic PDAs which I have tried and failed with for years. (Hipster PDA Articles)

I have now started to carry a small selection of 3×5 cards with some selected templates from DIYPlanner.com in an index card based leather note jotter from Staples. I also picked up an index box and some dividers while I was there to try and keep things in some form of order once I have written them down. The always available nature of pen and paper/card has already lent it’s self well to noting down ideas and thoughts I have had and things that I would probably have just forgotten have found their way onto a to-do list. Progressing through hand written to-do lists seems to be much more satisfying than just doing a job, so much so that if I find I have completed something that wasn’t on the list then I add it and immediately tick it off.

I am maintaining about three lists at the moment which are, work tasks, house tasks and incubation ideas. This is all loosely based on what I have gleaned about David Allens Getting Things Done which I will confess now to not knowing enough about (it is on my incubation list to find out more and re-read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People while I am at it).

So far though the system is light weight enough for me to manage but effective enough to be noticeable so I am a little wary of complicating things too much until I am into the routine a bit more. There are a few more templates I think I need to try to keep track of some of the larger projects when I finally get them started such as the Project Task/Objectives template. Overall I like the compact nature of the solution as I can carry around what I need in my coat pocket and the speed at which I can just jot things down or refer back to things seems much faster then the other PDAs I have tried.