The Happy Moron

Wherefore art thou, Time?

A little classic literature today. Aren’t we all looking out the balcony longing for a little more time? But Romeo and Juliet is just so… sappy idealized. I like the practicality of Mr. Micawber.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” — Mr Micawber (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield)

Does this work for time? I think it does – in two ways.

The first way is punctuality. This is a bold statement, coming as it does from a procrastinator.

It’s not fun living a perpetual five minutes (or 10, or 15) behind the times. Eternally chasing deadlines is a sucker’s game. So why am I so good at it?

I have a funny relationship with procrastination.

• On the one hand, looking at the hard evidence, we are on the best of terms. We spend lots of time together. The love is flowing.
• On the other hand, I can’t think of another thing off-hand that has caused me so much unhappiness for so little reward.

There’s an outrageous disconnect here.

The second way the rule applies is with regards to volume. What happens when you try to fit 800 blocks of time in a 672 block schedule?

673 blocks? 671 blocks?

I tend to get frustrated when I can’t do things that I want to do. At the same time, I have a great quantity of things that I want to do, but I never seem to have the time. I also, looking at the evidence, have a number of things that I currently do which hog the slots.

Video games, for example, have a terrible time/value trade-off. Dragon Age is the first video game I’ve played in a long time, and while it is a fantastic game, it’s a time eater. It’s impossible to play in small doses – it’s the book equivalent of a page turner.

Which is great, except for the whole “other things I want to do” and “limited time slot” problems.

And visible here.

Confession time – it’s really bad. The afternoon suffered greatly from my Saturday syndrome. When I’m mucking about I’m not as task oriented and I don’t keep as detailed track in my notebook. Then when I look over my time log it’s sketchy. The blocks of time are, I think, pretty accurate, but they weren’t all written down.

The one thing that time logging doesn’t measure well is quality. There’s a lot of work going on in the Sunday log, but it’s not all high quality work. The fact is,  I ran films continuously in the background. This is handy for films with a lot of dead time – you can tune in just for the good bits, and then get back to work when the film slows down.

But it does decrease the quality of the work experience.

If it wasn’t 3:30 in the morning I’d give some analysis.

I guess the immediate lesson is that tracking time doesn’t automatically help me manage it.

All week I was somewhat worried about my Saturday. Would I have the strength of character to do what I usually do – to waste the copious amounts of time I usually waste?

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried.

My day was pretty much the usual Saturday, with some intervention of work. I was also really bad at logging today, because I got distracted by long periods of spending time on the internet. So while the times are pretty accurate, the specificity is lacking.

For example,  I know my mother called while I was working, but I can’t for the life of me remember when.

Good comments on Friday’s post, by the way. Y’all done good, folks!

And whatever he posts will be well reflected on and thought provoking.

Nothing too special about it.

A. Lurkar rightly raised the issue that I haven’t yet protected my schedule from being indexed by the search engines and other web-crawlers. It’s possible that my week of Feb 01-07 will live on the internet forever.

I’m just not sure what kind of trouble this could cause me. There’s nothing particularly incriminating going on this week. I’m really struggling to figure out how someone could use this schedule to hurt me.

The people who could hurt me most, of course, are the people near to me – who know me. They’re the ones who have additional information which could give the schedule meaning.

For example, if Shaun knew I told Brad that I offered to help Brad with some programming stuff, he could tip Brad off that my Friday night was really being spent watching 80s television and playing Dragon Age.

There might be a possibility for someone to use this schedule to hurt me, but they’d better do it quick. The problem is, my schedule is dynamic. This week’s schedule is not a reliable indicator for future schedules – things change. If someone really wants to make my life miserable, they better do it quick.

The threat of data living on forever isn’t terrifying in this case, because if my schedule is findable in five years, it will be, well… It will be a trifle out of date.

Possibly the greatest real risk is that someone will find my schedule and judge me by it. What does it say about me? Does it say good things or bad things?

Perhaps I should put a little blurb up at the top which reminds everyone the diligence and strength of character required to log obsessively for a week. And then see if I can make the front page of reddit.

I dunno.

What do you think? If you click on the little “comment” link, you can let me know what your thoughts are.

Cheers.

While I was not as far behind as I am now behind.

The log is up.

Not much to see on a Thursday, I’m afraid – Work – Clean – Cook – Bible Study – Blogging – Bed.

The response to this little jaunt has been positive from all manner of folks. And my Mom hasn’t nagged me yet although she’s been on poor Shaun’s case.

Maybe come end of the week I’ll have some breakdowns and analysis. There are more lessons to learn, but not in my current state of tired.

Cheers.

Wednesday log is up.

Don’t forget to pay Shaun a visit!

Poor time-tracking during work hours today. I didn’t dedicate as much thought-space to logging as on Monday or Tuesday. I think it showed. In reality, I spent more time websurfing than might meet the casual eye, perhaps because I managed to break up my surfing into fractured little pieces  – 1, 2, 5 minutes long;  unworthy of explicit remark, but nonetheless significant when counted together.

I think I must be subconciously devious that way.

In particular, the way I’ve built my logging table means that I can’t have more than one categorization for slots, which is a shame, because some slots should be a mix of “work” and “internet”.

My day was also more fractured with more interruptions today, and I think that played a role. It also involved some technical stuff which didn’t go smoothly. When that happens I tend to get frustrated and want to surf.

Also I got to work later, which meant I didn’t have my usual ramp up time, so my surfing bled into a little later in the day.

Virtuous?

Today the buzz I felt on Monday has died down a little bit, but on Monday I felt tremendous pressure to be virtuous.

But what happens when I feel pressure to be virtuous? Does that mean I become more virtuous?

Or do I just change my behaviour?

I don’t want to diss behaviour modification, because I think it’s extremely important. But if I think that Scott the person is somehow magically different on this Monday because he’s scribbling notes in a little book and because he’s more task oriented, I’m sadly mistaken. I’m the same guy.

What does this experiment have to do with virtue as a state of being, with virtue as a state of soul?

The truth is, I’m not a different person this week, even though I may be behaving a little differently. (But not much, I still take naps in the evening and play video games. These are things that my pride would have me discard in an instant.)

But this does poke my pride. It does agitate some things that maybe I’m a little too attached to.

I’m quite self-concious about my web surfing, for example. It’s the thing I’m most interested in tracking. Am I some out of touch loser because my thought world is centered around the internet?

Virtue won’t come from my pencil and notebook, but my pencil and notebook might reveal some areas where peace and virtue need to make an appearance in my life.

Enough analysis. See you tomorrow, folks.

Stabbing in Corona LRT, man in his 20s.

Not fatal, but not comforting. Here’s a situation almost entirely beyond one’s own personal control.

As you can see, I didn’t manage my time well enough to talk too much.

Shaun’s day is here.

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.