In an effort to accelerate real progress across the board, I’ve listed twelve activities that can encapsulate where I spend most of my time and energy: (I realize that some activities naturally overlap)
- Drawing
- Reading
- Playing
- Thinking / Reflecting
- Creating
- Learning
- Writing
- Training
- Resting
- Communicating
- Cleaning / Organizing
- Recording / Documenting
By periodically recording what I am doing at a given moment, I can gain a better understanding of where I am spending most of my time and energy. While this may seem somewhat laborious, I think there is benefit in recording activity in this manner.
For example, if you were to associate tags to each activity when it is recorded, you can ultimately employ the use of a “tag cloud” to easily see where you are spending your time. You can see an example of a tag cloud for this site on the left sidebar. Words that are used more frequently appear larger, thus giving the viewer an immediate understanding of the prevalent themes in each post / page. (A full explanation and supporting examples of tag clouds can be found at IBM’s alphaWorks “Many Eyes” site here.)
You could also append the amount of time you are spending on each activity to gain even more awareness. For example, let’s say that you read between 1 and 3 hours per day. You could “tag” your activity entry as follows:
- Reading-1 (i.e. I read for 1 hour)
- Reading-2
- Reading-3
- Reading-2
- Reading-2
- Reading-2
In this example, the tag “Reading-2” would stand out from the others because it’s the average time that you spend reading at any given moment. This is important because some activities can take longer to “get in the flow” than others. I know from experience, certain activities – especially drawing – can take longer to achieve any sense of “flow” than say, reading.
The key is to leverage what the “tag cloud” is telling you in order to plan your development (activities) more effectively.