So, this was my first full week teaching at this new place. I still had to combine prep and actual classes with solving some paperwork and admin issues, but I am almost done settling in by now. That’s so far as work routines are concerned; at home, I am still bringing new pots and whatnot almost every day.
Derailments:
- lit_anki_rotestock — I was simply too absorbed with prep that I missed the midnight to do some 10-card reviews, ugh
- meta_days_ahead — on the first day after the extensive days of classes, derailed for the entire backlog that accumulated over the past few days while travelling, solving issues, running errands, and working, of course
- tbr_pur_pages_stale — added a bunch of books that I purchased to read for the classes I teach; explained in more detail here
Now, while I have been adding breaks to many goals on and off since the beginning of the year, now it’s getting clear that it’s unfeasible to return to all routines, so I started adding breaks for some of the lower-priority goals for half of the semester. (I have two intensive half-semester courses, so the load is twice what it will be in the second half of the semester; a very unfortunate setup to start a job in a new university and country)
Using @aad’s tool, which allows converting units required by each goal into time estimates and thus seeing what is required over the next days in order not to derail, I saw at some point that some 29 hours were expected of me over the next week just not to derail, that is, even if I don’t do anything on the goals where I have buffers. That was shocking to see, especially since I tend to keep buffers. A mental mathematics bug, where every single new commitment is just “another small thing that would be nice to do, just for 20-30 minutes a few times a week, I have time for that, right? Right?” So I was wondering, how much I actually expect of myself if I were to move parallel to the road (or let everything slip into the red and then do just the minimum on every goal every day — I am clearly on my way here anyways, judging from the fact that meta is now in the 30s instead of the 60-70s)
So I briefly coded a script that allows estimating this total load and learned that the entire commitment is around 42 hours. And that’s not taking into account that things that are actually controlled by external circumstances rather than Beeminder (like the amount of time spent on work; my Beeminder goals are mostly about not letting certain aspects slip and about spreading the load across the week) will actually take more of my time.
And the breakdown, out of those ~42 weekly hours (with upcoming changes in italics):
- Work: 20 hours — teaching, research, everything; it’s actually been over 32 hours this week already across aspects related to these goals (with half a day of intensive Sunday-afternoon prep remaining)
- Reading: 4.5 hours — about half of this requirement will be covered with things that also count toward “work”, but another half is the arcs that I pre-committed to — I know I technically don’t owe anyone anything, so I will let go of this or just keep the ARCs reviews overdue if it comes to this, but keeping for now
- “Self-expression”: 5 hours — blog posts, updates here, intend reviews, looking through my photos and posting them on iNaturalist. Added breaks on all photos-related goals; that’s clearly not a priority right now.
- Languages: 9 hours — that’s my half-reduced Lithuanian, recently added Polish (30 min daily each), retention-level effort for Spanish and German (a few minutes daily each). Put a break for German for now, will keep Spanish with 1-2 lessons of Duolingo (for Spanish, the available levels are more relevant to being actually useful on my language acquisition journey).
- Life organization and self-care: 1.5 hours — vitamins and micro-habits like using cuticle oil go here; of course, actual time spent on these aspects of life is way larger, but things like cooking or groceries shopping happen anyways, out of hunger, so no need to beemind them
- Communication: ~1 hour — just my weekly zoom calls with my grandma are counted, of course I actually spend much more time on this
- Physical activity: ~2 hours — ironically, it would be beneficial to increase this, for sanity and to compensate the ever-increasing hours of sitting at the computer (without anything close to an ergonomic setup yet)
So, that should already be ~3 hours less in a week, once the breaks kick in. Will try to reevaluate often.
If anyone is interested, I can prep a shareable version of this script. It will only require preparing a CSV file with a list of your goals with an explicit hierarchy (grouping them into categories like these if needed and also for instances when a few goals track the same activity from different points of view, e.g. when doing a yoga session will contribute both to “yoga” (times per week) and “physical activity” (minutes per week), so summing the estimates for those goals makes no sense).