[Tracking Every Minute]-Day 2 – A new beginning
After the first day of this challenge, which was a Sunday and one of my children’s birthday’s, I am happy to have a more traditional work day to follow it up. I feel it’s much easier to set up my calendar on a work day.
Honestly, it feels a bit weird to type “Celebrate Son’s Birthday” into Google calendar, but that’s pretty much what I did yesterday.
My goal is to track every minute of the day while I am awake. While I am trying to be a strict as possible about keeping track of my time, I am not using a stopwatch. I am also trying to fill out as much of my day in advance.
If things change, as they inevitably will, I can just update the calendar. This is all pretty trivial using google calendar, but can be done just as easily with a piece of paper.
Without further ado, here is day 2 of the track every minute challenge.
I am writing a post about how I setup my google calendar, and will hopefully add the link here when it’s ready. I have a few different calendars within my google calendar. I’ve set up the calendars with different colors and a few different rules.
Blue is my primary calendar. It’s the default google calendar, when anyone sends me an invite or shared event, it will show as this color. Green is my “work” calendar. This is the calendar I use to schedule my own predefined work blocks. Red is my “kids” calendar. I’ll use this calendar to track my time with my kids.
Awareness brings about change
I woke up at 6:00 on day 2. I used to wake up much earlier to get in more work before my kids woke up, but once I got a Whoop and started tracking my sleep, I’ve gotten much stricter with my sleep. It’s actually pretty similar to what I am hoping happens with this challenge.
Before I had my whoop I was going to sleep at 11 and waking up at 5. Over caffeinated and under-slept, I was probably doing more harm them good by trying to over optimize my days. I really value my morning time. If you have kids you probably understand. Uninterrupted time at home is rare. But, over the long-term, I am making the bet that getting more sleep will be more valuable.
I did not make this change overnight. I got my first Whoop with 2 friends. As I continually tracked my strain and recovery, I started noticing that I was not sleeping. Since getting my whoop I’ve lost a bunch of weight and I’ve been very active. The first step in making this major life change, was awareness. Before I started using the Whoop I “knew” I wasn’t living a healthy lifestyle, but the numbers weren’t in my face. Once the numbers were in my face, the pain became great enough to making changing easy.
Back to day 2 of this challenge. When I wake up at 6:00 I have about 30 minutes to meditate, read, etc. Today was a better day because I got to do this.
I wake up my younger kids at 6:30 every morning. From this point until I drop them off, I am working for them. Case in point, after the first trip into their room to wake them up, I get started on their breakfast order. Once their breakfast is ready, typically at around 6:45, I’ll wake my other child up, make another trip into their bedroom to wake them up again and then walk the dogs.
Depending on the drop off I’m handling in the morning, I am typically just herding the kids to finish getting ready to get out the door. Once out the door I am typically driving kids to and from for an hour, which wraps up this block of 6:30 to 8:30, which I will typically bunch together as morning drop off.
New Month New Location
I typically work out of an office suite, which was about 15 minutes from my house. But I wasn’t using it enough to justify the extra cost, so I moved out and am back working from home. This gives me an opportunity to take walks with my dogs in the morning, which I did on this day from 8:30 – 9:30. Another benefit of working from home is that I was able to cook breakfast for my wife and I.
At 9:30 I had my first work block. This is a practice I picked up from Cal Newport. Comm blocks are typically where I batch communication tasks. In the morning, this will include going through email and making any calls that are required for the day.
This practice is the best one I picked up over the last few years. Closing my inbox allows me to focus on whatever my current task at hand is. I am not constantly jumping back into check my email. For me, right now, response times are not urgent on anything coming into my email inbox.
For me this block also helps get me into work mode. I’ve switched from parenting to working. The next block will typically be my main focus block, so I try to really be disciplined with this block. That means phone out of reach, or at least upside down and as little distractions as possible. From 10 am – 12:30 I worked on these very words that you are reading right now.
From there I had lunch, and had another work block in the afternoon before switching back into parenting mode for the rest of the night.
Main Takeaways from Day 2
- I really enjoy my morning reading time. It had been a while since I did it, I should try to do more of it.
- Working from home has its perks. Walking the dogs on a beautiful morning, having breakfast with my wife, these move the needle on quality of life.
- Got to read for about an hour and half today, which is a lot.
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