#also (moving on from that) i even constantly have like 40 tumblr blog tabs open at all times

[derpinette]

sometimes i will get bored & go through someone's entire blog since its creation

[copperbadge]

Hi Sam! I'm curious about your magical time management skills: you have a full-time job, are super active in fandom, answer countless asks, write fanfiction and books, and still have time for jogging and many other stuffs. How do you organize yourself? I feel super overwhelmed due to lack of time and end up not doing what I want do. Do you allot time to do stuff? How does your typical day looks like? And any useful tips for us slackers.

I dunno how helpful it’ll be – I mean, some of it is time management, and some of it is that I have spent a long time working on arranging my life so that I have as much free time to pursue my own interests as possible. This hasn’t consciously meant giving up things like close brickspace friends and romantic relationships but in some ways it has kind of worked out that way. (Not that I couldn’t have those things if I chose to work towards them, in other words, but they don’t come naturally to me and I don’t mind the lack.) 

So, I will give you a rundown of my average day, but before we begin, I will also give you some context! And this will be long so I’ll put it under a readmore. 

I have at present no romantic partner, no children, no pets. This sounds sad, but I’m not complaining; I could work towards those things and choose not to, for a variety of reasons, some good, some not. I would like to have a partner, but honestly at this point in my life it’s as much because it’s cheaper to cohabitate; I am very independent and not, I suspect, built for the kind of daily intimacy that romantic cohabitation requires. 

If I were to get a pet it would probably not be a dog, since when I was dogsitting for R I had real trouble with the concept of properly caring for a creature whose life was so scheduled, who required specific attentions at specific times – I have owned dogs before and love them deeply, but never in an apartment or as a solitary person. I would probably get a cat or an axolotl (axolotls: like being alone, require very specific but easy-to-procure stimulus, look like tiny water dragons, sound like fantasy aliens). 

I have very few close brickspace friends, not by design but just because I’m kind of a private homebody, and my extensive network of online friendships is satisfying in that regard. But online friendships, while not LESS of a time commitment, are a different kind of commitment – you can multitask while hanging out with online friends, you don’t have travel times, if they’re running late you’re not stuck waiting and vice versa. 

I also am not in school, which is much more life-consuming than many jobs. School is a way of life; work can be, but doesn’t have to be. And I am very fortunate (in the literal sense of “it is luck that brought me here”) to have a job where I spend the vast majority of my time a) on a computer and b) in self-directed, non-public-facing work. For most of my day, every day, I guide my own workflow, I choose what to work on and when. Of course I have deadlines, but within the strictures of those deadlines I am free to triage my time as appropriate, and because I’m on a computer with unrestricted internet access, I can take ten minutes to log onto tumblr, read some things, respond to some things, and then go back to my work. 

So I am starting from an advantageous position: few personal commitments, unstructured time throughout the day, and a job where when I leave for the day, work stays at work. 

So here’s what a normal day is like for me. Bear in mind this is for comparison purposes rather than because I think it’s particularly ideal.

I wake up around 4am; if I haven’t slept well or feel like I need it, I may go back to sleep for about an hour. Normally when I get up I either work out from 4-5 (weights, running) or I sit on the couch with my laptop and check out what’s been going on while I was asleep. We’ll circle back to this, but I go to bed quite early, so at this point I have generally had at least seven hours of sleep. Also, I am a morning person, so I go straight from zero to lucid, which is nice. 

I answer email, check tumblr, check my RSS feeds (podcasts, news, fanfic, a couple of NSFW blogs that I can’t have on my tumblr feed because I read it at work). I look at my calendar so that I know what’s on offer for the day – my calendar doesn’t cover work stuff, but primarily anything I want to or need to do after work. My family has a mutual Google Calendar that we all use to schedule stuff the others should see, like whenever I take a vacation, and my parents also use it as their central calendar, so I can see what they’ll be up to on any given day. I’ve been thinking of switching over to a private Google Calendar, but out of habit for years I’ve used a custom-built spreadsheet, now in Google Sheets, that looks like a calendar: 

That’s July. This kind of layout works well for me because it’s easy to go in and change things, and I get a good “high level” view of the month. As you can see I’m traveling quite a bit; I’m tracking new TV shows, peoples’ birthdays, events I may attend (I will probably not be at everything happening in evenings on the week of the 10th), baseball games I have tickets for, and possible plans for camping. Google Calendar would work as well and would have some significant advantages, I just haven’t got off my ass to switch over. 

Around five, I usually get up and fix breakfast; often I’ll put on something to listen to while I cook and/or eat. If I’ve been working out, all the stuff I did – checking email, tumblr, etc – is pushed forward, and I do a bit less of it. But essentially from 4-6 I’m working out, eating breakfast, and getting a start on the personal-life aspect of my day. In terms of social media, this is the time I’m most likely to like something or save it to drafts to deal with later; I don’t spend brainpower on responding this early in the morning, usually. 

I have some fairly…prescriptive routines for the rest of the day, and that works for me, I like structure. Other people may find this sort of thing doesn’t work for them, and that���s okay. This is, again, for comparison purposes, not to dictate how your life should be. 

At six o’clock my alarm goes off, warning me that I have nine minutes before I need to stop what I’m doing and start getting ready for work. This is by design, so that I have a buffer zone in which to shift my mental attitudes from morning routine to something more focused. I hit snooze on the alarm and then at 6:09 I turn the alarm off and get in the shower. I shower, brush my teeth, and get dressed in clothes I laid out over a rail the night before (I have an electric heated towel rail, one of the best random-ass things my mother ever gave me, and in winter I turn the heat on so I come out of the shower and into warm undies; in summer it’s just a convenient place to hang clothes). I dress, grab my bag, take my keys off the doorknob and put them in a pocket of the bag, and I’m out the door around 6:25. I catch the 6:40 express bus to work. I usually read on my tablet on the bus (currently reading The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier after remembering how much I loved her prose in Girl With A Pearl Earring) and I get to work around 7. 

At work I have routines too: I set down my bag, hang up my jacket, and before I do anything else I get my 32oz mug and go to the kitchen to get ice water to sip on throughout the morning. I come back to my desk, turn on my monitors, and log into my computer. 

I check my work email first, to make sure nothing is on fire from yesterday, since I leave work quite a bit earlier than most of my colleagues. If nothing is urgent I delete anything irrelevant to me, respond to anything that needs immediate response, and move on to a quick glance at email and tumblr, then I open my “daily bookmarks” folder. My daily bookmarks folder is mostly stuff that either I can’t or don’t want to put in my RSS reader: a couple of messageboards, a few real estate sites I’m watching for my dream home to show up, a couple of tumblr tags (I don’t follow tags on tumblr because I don’t like seeing shit recur constantly on my dash), and some activism facebook pages because I despise facebook but it’s the only site some of these organizations use. If it’s Monday, I also open my Monday bookmark folder, which is a combination of sites that rarely update and “event” sites (the cinema I’m a member of so I can see what new movies are coming, the calendar of a local band I like, the events page of various cultural centers). I review these quickly, closing most tabs and setting aside anything I need to look at more indepth like an event I’d like to attend. Usually basically I fuck around on the internet until about 8, unless work has something urgent for me. 

The one scheduled task I have daily at work is news clipping, where I read several news sites and save off articles of interest to our staff, which need to be turned in by mid-morning. Realistically this could take 15 minutes of focused work, but I like to read the news, too, so from eight to eight forty-five or nine, I’m usually reading a very specifically aimed sort of news, saving off articles, and archiving them appropriately. 

After that, the day is, in many ways, mine to do with as I please.

I organize my life by using Google Tasks, which is a little pop-up to-do list in gmail. I have a to-do list for every day, and anything that doesn’t get done one day gets moved to another day, depending on how urgent it is. So at nine or so, I open Google Tasks and start moving each task around based on how urgent it is or how quickly I can do it. Urgent work and fast tasks go at the top; less urgent work, stuff I’m less enthused about, and stuff I can’t do at my desk (buying a card for Father’s Day, picking up groceries after work, etc) goes at the bottom. Some tasks are recurring – every Monday, for example, Radio Free Monday is at the top of the list because it’s time-sensitive. 

You can see RFM there at the top; I have to email some information about a 5K to a friend, but I need to get his email from another friend first; I have some registration and hotel issues to attend to for an upcoming conference; I have to write up some evaluations, and do some reading for a presentation I’m giving. I should stop by my PO Box after work. Other stuff will no doubt be added when I check my work email (documents to be prepared, research requests) but this is where I start the day. You can also see I have stuff with pushed out deadlines – Credit Cards is a monthly reconciliation for my corporate card, which I will do ON the 26th rather than BEFORE it, and quarterly I check my 401K, so I won’t need to do that until August 7th.

“PRESENTATION: Reading” will probably get pushed to another day, because by the time I get down that far on the list, I won’t have a ton of brainpower left to do a lot of reading and analysis. It’s ok, my presentation’s not due until the 30th.

And then I just work through my to-do list. Some days I’m really good at getting it done. Some (rare) days I spend most of my time reading tumblr and fucking around because I’m not having a good focus day. But again: this is a job in which I have the luxury to do that, and I’m very lucky. 

Rather than take a traditional lunch, I usually eat two small meals, at 11am and 2pm. Usually I bring most of my lunch for the week on Monday and just reheat tupperwares as I go, augmenting them with cheese and crackers; sometimes I’ll throw in a protein bar from a stash I keep in a little box on my desk. Most of my lunches are cooked on the weekends, when my time is a lot less structured. You’ve probably seen my COOKING DAY posts; sometimes I just set aside a day to cook and rest.

I’m gonna tackle fandom and social media here because truthfully my job has enough spare time built into it that this is when I do the majority of my fannish activity, at work, in small chunks. And yes I am very active in fandom but occasionally in very limited ways.

I don’t read a ton of fannish blogs. I have a limit on my tumblr of following 99 people, and I choose those people very carefully. Some are friends, but those who aren’t personally known to me are people who post both low-volume and things that are of interest to me. I do not follow people who flood dashes not because I disapprove but because I don’t have time to wade through ten million gifsets of things that I’m not concerned with. I also follow a few artist or writers, but again, only if they’re of relevance to me. I follow Skottie Young because I really like his art and think he’s a cool dude, and most of what he posts is his art. I don’t follow Matt Fraction because while I think he is also a cool dude and I enjoy his writing, his tumblr wasn’t generally speaking about his writing or him, it was aesthetic stuff I didn’t care for and it was A LOT OF IT. 

I don’t read a ton of fanfic. I have a couple of tags fed to my RSS reader and I subscribe to a couple of fics and fic writers, but even then I skim for interesting summaries and tag combinations I don’t find offputting. I don’t read fanfic at work, full stop; when I find one I want to read, I set it aside for a time when I’m at home and feel like reading fanfic.

Throughout the day I will check in on tumblr, in a very systematic manner: I read my dash, only the posts, and like or queue anything I want to reblog or examine later. I read my inbox and try to respond, but some asks don’t get answers for a really long time, because they require more focus or time or whatnot. I read my Activity page and open any reblogs with commentary; I set comments aside to be responded to en mass. I check my likes and try to clean out anything I’ve liked that could go in drafts or queue; I check my drafts and try to move just one draft into my queue (I constantly have a draft backlog). This all takes about ten minutes, then I go back to work.

I get AO3 comment notifications throughout the week, but generally I set aside a block of time either on Friday (if work is slow) or on Sunday to “clear out” my comments; every week I go through my comments, re-read each one, and either delete it or respond to it and then delete it. I don’t reply to a vast majority of them simply because I don’t have the time to respond to each one (I have tried, it was very stressful) and also because most of them don’t really a require a response. For everyone’s patience in this, I thank you.

So work is a long series of multitasking, breaks, deadline work, procrastination. It’s about average, I’d say, with anyone else in my situation. If I’m doing something after work, I check to make sure I know how to get there and what’s going on; if I don’t have all the info I need, I prepare a “brief” that has maps and directions and anything else I need, print that out, and toss it in my messenger bag. And then around 3:45 I pack up my bag, make sure I have my phone, and I head out to either (usually) catch the 4pm express bus home, or catch transit of my choice to whatever I’m doing after work. 

If I don’t have something I’m doing after work, I come home, take my keys out of the bag pocket, hang them up on the doorknob once I’m inside, and set my bag down. I’m very specific about my keys here, as I was up above, as a way of demonstrating that I live a very habitual life. Stuff like keys, phone, wallet always has a specific place it goes, and it stays there if I’m not using it. I used to lose shit a lot, and rigidly adhering to “if this is not in your hand, it should be in X pocket” is what saves me. 

I change into more comfortable clothes, usually yoga pants and a t-shirt. I make something for dinner and eat it, I unpack anything that needs to come out of my bag and pack anything that needs to go into it, and then usually these days I fuck around on the ukulele for a while. I don’t set a time limit on it, so sometimes I do it for half an hour, sometimes for ninety minutes. It’s a way of unwinding and finding stress relief, so it’s entirely voluntary and anything I do during this time is being done because I want to do it. I think it’s the only thing in my life where there are no external pressures anywhere and I have set no goals for myself. 

I don’t think external pressures and goals are inherently bad. The goals I set for myself in my other hobbies, like writing and running, being in fandom, going to movies and such, are good goals and they help me do well. External pressure is something that exists in every human interaction; that’s just the nature of being a person in society, and likewise isn’t a terrible thing. And not everyone needs a release from those things, or finds that release in the same way. I like a lot of my life; I wouldn’t do things if I didn’t like them. But I have found that it helps to have one thing which only belongs to you and which has no goals or benchmarks. For me that’s currently the ukulele. 

In the later evening – and let’s be clear, I get home at like 4:30 so “later” to me is 6ish – I’ll hop back on tumblr, maybe do a little writing, or attend or host a stream. I’ll chatter with people, respond to emails and posts, read things I had set aside for reading earlier in the day; it’s probably my most socially active time.

When I was in my twenties I did perfectly fine on five hours of sleep a night, but as I got older that stopped being comfortable, and also I started realizing that after a certain point in the day, I not only wasn’t doing anything useful or interesting, I wasn’t having a good time. I was being awake for the sake of not going to bed. So I adjusted my life to going to bed at nine, and when I started getting up earlier to run, I adjusted again. In order to do that, I created an evening routine, because going to bed is easier if you start out by doing other shit BEFORE going to bed. 

Now, generally, I log off between 7 and 7:30. Sometimes I go to bed that early, but that’s when I close down social interaction. Not necessarily turning off the computer, but just gently shutting down on being “around” other people. I log off chats, I stop responding to emails and tumblr posts. I set them aside for the morning. I might continue to read my dash or listen to podcasts or whatnot until eight or so. 

I change into pyjamas, wash my face, brush my teeth, lay out my clothes for tomorrow, and get into bed, usually with my tablet to do a little reading. It’s a very rare evening I go to bed any time past 8:30.  And that’s my day.

I have actually some reasoning about why I go to bed so early, but I think it’s the most important part of a post that is REALLY LONG and otherwise devoted to the boring details of my day, so I’m going to make it a separate post. 

I hope this has helped, Anon! As you can see, what helps me organize and sort out all my time commitments is schedules, lists, and an adherence to several fairly rigid habits – this may not work for you, and I don’t recommend it for everyone. But for me, it’s really the only way I can stay on top of everything, especially in cases where I’m dealing with some particularly intense depression. I’m happy to answer questions, though if people have commentary about the post they should remember to reblog or comment, since I don’t repost asks sent to me about other asks. 

[sporadicstudentnightthings-blog]

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