Get Everything Done

Hi all!

This is my first time posting here. Seeing that many of you seem to have been around here for a while, I was hoping that I could get some pointers in my attempts to apply some of Mark’s suggestions. I’m taking classes full-time and working part-time, both remotely. I don’t know how special my situation is, but besides scheduled classes/meetings, I’m struggling to manage my “discretionary time.” My tasks fall into a few categories:

• School work, some with associated deadlines.
• Paid work of which I need to do a certain number of hours each week.
• Personal tasks like house chores
• Recurring daily-ish tasks like exercise
• Leisure tasks like playing video games.

This is the strategy I’ve tried for the past few weeks:
1. For recurring tasks, I’ve scheduled them into my calendar. If I end up missing it, then I just forget about it.
2. For the other tasks, I’ve maintained a separate to-do list for each category, so a “school” list, a “work” list, etc. I had 5 lists (I have 2 part-time jobs). I used FVP to work through them. I know this is against Mark’s recommendation, but it seemed to be the best way to do it given that…
3. I tried implementing the “school timetable” schedule which Mark recommended for stay-at-home workers. To ensure that I fulfilled the hours for paid work, I designated afternoons for work. To simulate office workers’ “work” for the other hours, I designated mornings for school work. I scheduled my computer to shut down automatically at the beginning and end of each work period to ensure I stopped whatever I was doing before and ended work on the dot, as Mark suggested.
4. Personal and leisure tasks were left off the schedule. I tried scheduling additional time for personal tasks, but it never worked.

What worked:
1. I had started early on a school assignment and submitted it hours before the deadline. This is a big deal for me, since I usually submit assignments last minute, sometimes literally.
2. I kept up on my hours for my part-time jobs and felt the serenity that comes when I’m certain that I’ll fulfill the hours instead of worrying about fulfilling them.
3. Within one list, I felt freer than when I used a system that dictated a certain order. I could get multiple things moving.
4. I never felt I worked too long in one session since there were (tech-enforced) scheduled breaks. Knowing that also made me resist work less.

Problems I encountered:
1. I kept missing recurring tasks scheduled at the beginning of the day because I would sometimes wake up late. This made me feel guilty.
2. I would oftentimes miss recurring tasks scheduled for the middle of the day because:
a. I would feel I scheduled too many tasks during my two-hour lunch break, leaving me feeling like I was rushing to get through all the tasks rather than feeling rejuvenated.
b. I would occasionally go shopping or out for lunch with my brother. It’s really the nicest time to go out.
3. While I was pretty consistent in doing recurring tasks scheduled for the end of the day, it would often feel like I was going against my “psychological readiness” (aka I felt too tired to do it but did it anyways).
4. As Mark probably foresaw, whenever I worked on one of my lists, I would be afraid that I was missing something important on another list.
5. Since I never scheduled a time to do personal tasks, my personal list fell by the wayside, with consequences on my home environment. I used all my non-scheduled time on leisure (video games and Internet).
6. One-off meetings became a headache. I would need to remember to turn off the auto-shutdowns to prevent my computer shutting down during the meeting. I would need to remember to turn them back on to continue my schedule. After the meeting, I would need to think about how long of a break I should take to make up for any break times the meeting took away. If I was tired and didn’t want to calculate that, I just took a long break until lunch time.
7. If I woke up late and missed one or two work sessions, I would feel discouraged and waste the whole morning. I think this is partly because the breaks are of uneven lengths, so I feel like I would be indulging in too long of a break if I take the 30-minute break without doing the first work session, and I would be working too much if I do the 3rd and 4th sessions and only get a 10-minute break in between. I have funny thoughts.
8. Generally feeling somewhat trapped by the schedule and my slew of auto-shutdowns and feeling like the system is a burden to maintain.

I have tried to solve this on my own to no avail. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you Mark! I've been trying out what you've suggested. While it feels a lot more free/flexible, I am finding that it can be quite difficult to bring myself to get started on the list. When I sit down at the desk I often default to time-wasting activities like surfing the web and chatting with people online.

I have tried a few solutions:

- doing tasks in 10-minute increments (set timer). This was effective in getting me started, but it became a little frustrating when I finished a task before 10 minutes is up and only worked on another task for like 2-3 minutes and was interrupted. I also started doing 10-minutes of work and 10-minutes of break, which made it seem like it would take a long time to fulfill 7 hours of work for example, and that it'd be filled with many interruptions.

- attempting to do 30-minutes of work and 10-minutes of break. I could not get started on the first 30 minutes because committing to work 30-minutes seemed daunting.

- not timing work/break times and just selecting break activities through the FVP algorithm, doing things for as long as I felt like it and no longer. It was still difficult to bring myself to the list. If I succeeding in working the list, once I chose a task like chatting with people online, I found it difficult to stop even when I felt like it.

- easing the fear of all work and no play by guaranteeing myself free time around meal times and before bed, but today for example I missed my morning break time and wasted the morning again. I guess I really can't rely on anything involving set times in the morning.

Maybe I'm overcomplicating things again and it's actually quite simple? My apologies for being obtuse. I would again greatly appreciate any pointers.