[Day 57] Weekly updates: My approach to staying organized

I am, and I have always been a scatterbrain to some extent. To cope with my disorderliness, over the course of my life, I have adopted three mindsets that worked for me: 

a) Hyper-focusing on a task I found the most interesting at any particular moment, 

b) Being lost in thought - a coping mechanism to clear my mind and relax, 

c) Mechanically chipping in on the task that is intrinsically boring but unconditionally has to be done to avoid some of the unpleasant consequences stemming from me not having pleased some of the people I've had a social obligation to please (e.g. some pointless uni assignments that offer no added value whatsoever).

 I would spend as much time as possible in the first mindset, resulting in me neglecting any goals that could be achieved by using the third mindset.

  It's not hard to deduce that while this sort of lifestyle is not as bad when you are aware of your limitations and want to get by with as little effort as possible but it fails miserably when trying to pursue complex, long-term goals that improve the quality of your life drastically. On some days I would rather just sit behind the computer screen because either I had nothing to do, nothing really sparked my interest or I forgot how much work there was to be done. Until quite recently, I have never taken notes of anything - obligations I had, things I needed to accomplish etc.

  The point about forgetting tasks because of the lack of structure is probably the most important one. Forgetting what you wanted to do due to the limitations of your cognitive structures is undoubtedly a logical fallacy that is detrimental to one's success particularly concerning long-term tasks. Yet I didn't think of it that way until I was almost nineteen.

  Upon realizing the severity of my oversight, I spent about a month designing a system, that would help me cope with tasks that were either imposed on me as a part of an obligation package called "first-year uni student" or tasks I've set out for myself as a means of self-actualization. Needless to say, the first iteration of my system failed miserably (otherwise I would have started my self-improvement project 1,5 years earlier) and I reverted to my disorganized state of being about a week after I designed the system. After that, I failed 3 more times until finally (in late March 2018) I succeeded in designing more-less usable system and sticking to it. 

  In a way that it's currently designed, my system contains extremely rigid structure for sorting the tasks themselves but a relatively flexible structure in regards to accomplishing the tasks themselves. It consists of me sitting down each Sunday evening for about an hour. Throughout that hour, I assessed what I accomplished past 7 days and if I was happy with the amount of work I did. Afterwards, I set out a plan for the next week. Apart from urgent tasks that require my attention at short notice, I am not particularly concerned about precise time in which to do the tasks themselves as long as I can mark them as completed at the end of the week. This is what my output from my activity log for this week looks like:

Tasks completed:

96 (388 in total since 05/04/2018)

Habits completed:

151 (387 in total since 05/04/2018)

Habits failed: 

13 (59 in total since 05/04/2018)

Time management:

~48,5h sleeping

~42h of self-imposed work (reading, studying, self-improvement)

~23h of desired leisure (mostly watching TV series or listening to music)

~17h of wasted leisure (browsing social media / YT without any real meaning behind it)

~15h of required work (attending school, doing chores that I don't value)

~9,5h of leisure involving people (aka socializing)

~13h of utility (biological needs, transportation and downtime before tasks themselves)

  As you can see, the structure is very rigid and takes quite some time to maintain (about 2 hours weekly dedicated to it's minimum) but on the other hand, I get a detailed report of how I spent my time throughout the week and how much I accomplished. For now, I just wanted to provide a brief overview of how exactly I personally manage my resources throughout the week and how I got into (in my opinion) life-savingly useful habit of doing so. I'll talk about the activities my workweek consists of further down the line so stay tuned.

Hope you are having a wonderful day

Cheers