As you can see, I didn’t manage my time well enough to talk too much.
A pretty average Tuesday. The lesson of the day is that an engrossing, story based game is very difficult to pull away from. I started playing Dragon Age with the intent to play for just half an hour, but doing so was very… unsatisfying.
Mind you, when I finally put the controller down after an hour and forty five minutes, it was still unsatisfying. Huh.
Not so much time on the internet today – time on the internet was mostly spent writing this blog post and updating the log.
However, there is some daily browsing that I find difficult to give up entirely. If I don’t find time to do it outside of work, it kind of sneaks its way inside work, in little bits and pieces that aren’t big enough to derail an entire chunk. But it still happens.
I find that the actual time spent on recording what I’m doing is very small (except for writing it up, of course). I only fill two sides of a pocket notebook sheet with writing.
But the mental burden is significant. I’m constantly thinking about logging, although perhaps less today than yesterday. I find myself annoyed with tasks that are not 5 or 15 minutes in duration. I find myself especially annoyed with tasks that are 15 minutes in duration but that extend on both sides of a quarter hour mark. Grr…
One thing I’m finding is that I’m always doing *something*. Even in my dead time, I’ll always find something that keeps me trivially occupied – I never spend any time doing absolutely nothing. The closest I got today was when I was eating supper.
I expect Wed – Thurs to be routine as I generally don’t have too much discretionary time. But we’ll see.
8 Responses to "Tuesday Log is up"
I think this is a great thing you’re doing. One thing I’ve been trying to work through is what I do with my time. Finding that balance between being productive and important, resting, and doing things that are completely unimportant. Sometimes I find doing unimportant things to be very difficult; like I don’t have enough time to bother with them.
As for your hour and a half of supporting a friend’s hard work, I think that’s okay as long as you don’t do it all the time! It’s shorter than a movie…
One thing that’s interesting about this is that it’ll show you some of your habits; good and bad.
I was listening to a podcast about a newly married couple who was having some trouble: the girl’s husband was addicted to video games. He played “just a little bit each day” when they got married. “Just a little bit” meant at least 3 hours. Once he even did a 72-hour marathon of gaming. The guy who hosted the podcast brought up a really interesting point. When we look at addictions from a Christian point of view, one of the biggest dangers of them is that whatever it is, it gets put ahead of God. Addictions as a form of idolatry, I suppose. For this fellow, it was video games. For others it’s alcohol or smoking or pornography or exercising or whatever.
The host made a point that I thought was very true. As Christians, we should be spending with God each day. That’s the one thing that we should do every day. If there are other activities that we absolutely cannot give up for one day, that would be a good sign that one needs to look into what that activity is, and whether or not it gets in the way of them and God.
Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent. I think it’s cool that you’re doing this; have fun
This is fascinating read, I have to say. An interesting spin off is that we rarely get to see what other people do with their day in any sort of hypermicroawareness kind of way…. uh, those of us not on twitter, of course
@Brad – that’s not really a tangent. That’s in fact very close to what poked me to do this.
Do I put my time where my mouth is?
Of course, there’s the wrinkle that I tend to be a controlling person, and so the act of hypermicroawareness might itself be an idol for me. It might make me more productive, but is that necessarily holy?
I might also say that we spend time with God each day whether we want to or not, but I know what you meant
@Brad and Janet.
Feel free to join in, by the way. It’s never too late. You both have blogs, yes?
We’d love the company
OK, I bit-ted – you know where to find me
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I hope you’re using a robots.txt in that directory.
Not yet, but I’ve thought a little bit about exploitation potential. It’s quite a short window to take advantage of.
As a historical record, I’ve been careful to keep things generic – ‘automated test’, ‘feature’. First names appear here and there.
There is no real anonymity with the schedule, however – it’s trivially tied to me by the domain it’s hosted on. My registration information for thehappymoron.com is fully visible.
But I’m just not sure how you’d exploit it. Scheules are dynamic, so it’s sensitivity will drop dramatically with time.
It’s no more a risk than anything else I post.
However, a robots.txt is hardly an overbearing burden. I just didn’t think of it.