Time Blocking
The concept of time blocking has become popular in recent years, especially as work now spills over into the 24 hours of life we are given each day. Time blocking is a way to get control of your life, to set aside blocks for work, but also to set aside blocks for other things that are important to you: sleep, exercise, family, fun. Yes, we have to schedule fun now. Such is life.
How to Time Block
There are many books, podcasts, and even apps that can help you get started with time blocking. Cal Newport is a CS prof who writes on time blocking and other life hacks. I recommend starting with his podcast: The Deep LIfe. Cal was early to the space of recognizing that our minds are being hacked by big tech and we need tools to regain control of our lives.
When I first started listening to Cal, I realized that I had been time blocking for most of my adult life, but I didn’t have a trendy name for it. I make schedules in spreadsheets. I’ve had a love affair with Excel since the day we met. Putting things-to-do in little boxes makes me feel like I’m large and in charge!
Large and in charge!
One big ugly block of time
When I decided to go back to school for my PhD I was already kinda old, and so I wanted to hurry up. I made a decision to hunker down and do PhD all day every day. I got through in 4 years, and I’m glad I did that. I didn’t need a spreadsheet for my time blocks because there were only two: a block for sleep, and the rest of the day was one big ugly block of work. Was this healthy? No. I lost touch with friends and had minimal family time. I knew that it was temporary so I did it even though I knew it wasn’t healthy.
Overwork as lifestyle
Guess what? It wasn’t temporary. It became my lifestyle. In 2016, got hired as a CS prof two weeks before the Fall semester was to start, and a lot of that time was taken up with BS training that wasn’t helpful. I was assigned to teach 2 sections of Computer Architecture and 1 section of Programming Fundamentals. I can teach programming in my sleep, and may have done exactly that if some of my student reviews that first year were accurate. Yikes! Computer Architecture was a challenge because we were teaching a RISC language, MIPS, and all my assembly language coding experience was with CISC assembly languages like x85, HCS12, etc. I had to work my proverbial buns off that first semester to keep up. By the way, I learned to really love MIPS. What a clean, unpolluted, precise language. I’ll write an Ode to MIPS later.
On top of the stressful job, I was commuting about 45 minutes to/from work on one of the worst highways in the country, Central Expressway, known locally as Central Distressway. I continued my unhealthy approach to life, and for some reason my husband tolerated it. Probably because he was equally busy.
As I learned my job as a CS prof, things did not get easier. No surprise, completely my fault. I like learning new things so I asked if I could teach new courses in machine learning and natural language processing. I didn’t like any available textbooks for undergraduates, so I wrote my own. Then the pandemic happened and we went online. I knew my students would not be able to learn what I wanted them to learn in that boring online environment we were using. I decided to make 20-minute or less videos that summarized the main things I wanted students to take away from each topic. I posted those on YouTube. How did I do all this? Simple, by not having a life outside of work.
Retire-lite
As I’ve blogged about before, life events in my 65th year of life caused me to take a year off of work. Or maybe I’m retired. I haven’t fully decided as of today. I don’t believe in retiring though. I think people need to have a purpose and need to keep their brains engaged. So I am continuing to work this year on my own projects, my books and videos. Right now, I’m working on an update to my NLP book for 3 hours a day. I’m also currently renovating two of our rent houses so I can sell them, and I’m renovating the home I live in. I’m calling this retire-lite because it’s not like I’m not working, I’m just working for me now instead of a boss.
I also want to live for the first time in a long time. I want that elusive work-life balance that people talk about but I haven’t personally experienced in about a dozen years. I came up with a schedule and have been tweeking it all summer. Here is the current iteration for next week:
Time Block Schedule for Year 1 of Retirement
My Retirement Time-Block Schedule
I start each day with a walk or a run. I run 2 miles 2 times a week. The other days I walk either in my neighborhood or at a couple of nature areas we have in the southern, hilly section of Dallas County. After my walk I enjoy a bath. My osteo doc recently told me that everyone over 30 has arthritis that shows up in x-rays, but that he really didn’t see much in my x-rays, especially for someone my age (a phrase I’m beginning to hear often). I attribute this to long hot baths and yoga, but it could be genetic luck.
I have a 3-hour block of time in which I work on my books, associated GitHub code and YouTube videos. After lunch, I have a 2-hour block of time for errands, most of which now involve renovating the houses. I labeled this block “errands, explore” because I hope to do more fun things in this block in the future. Nerdy fun things like book stores, films, museums. The Dallas Ft. Worth area has a lot to offer.
I reserve an hour a day for reading, knitting, or playing the piano, labeled RKP. I’m sure that those of you who are not yet retired really hate me now for having this freedom, but keep in mind that I worked for nearly 50 years and raised 2 kids so I’ve earned it.
At 5:00 I eat for the last time of the day (that intermittent fasting thing), then I work on my Spanish for an hour, then I do yoga for an hour. As of this writing, my Spanish is still mierdo, but I believe anything is possible with persistent effort. As for yoga, I learned the sun salutation in my early 20s and I do that every morning. Now I’m learning more yoga in an online class. Yoga is awesome. Yoga is everything you could want in an exercise program: strength, flexibility, balance. My son still nags me into doing squats and pushups every day, though., which I do after my morning walk/run.
At 8 pm I start winding down, which is easy to do after yoga. I read mainly, although sometimes I do watch shows. After the last semester ended, I binged on Barry, and then Succession. I’m more in a reading mood lately.
How many days of the week do I actually follow this schedule? Right now, not many because the renovation work is taking up a lot of time. I’m looking forward to finishing all the current renovation projects by the end of September so I can more faithfully follow my schedule starting in October.
Sabbath, sabbatical, and rest
Notice that I’ve purpled out Saturday and Sunday. When I started this schedule in May, I treated Saturday and Sunday just like any other day. I also used my “errands and explore” time for more work on the computer. Old habits die hard. Not surprisingly, I started to feel a little exhaustion. I wondered why I was tired in retire-lite.
Exhaustion is a sign of burnout. The remedy for burnout is rest and restorative activities. The ancients knew this. Various religious traditions have a concept of one day a week that is a sabbath, a sacred day devoted to higher purposes than work. Last semester I tried a Saturday break by telling my students that I didn’t answer email from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday night. It helped me tremendously.
A religious sabbath has a lot of rules. Since my 24-hour break is not religious, I can make my own rules. My rules are simple: do anything except working on my books, videos, code. I can cook, clean house, do laundry, read (even technical books), watch a show, visit family, anything. Since I am in retire-lite, I gave myself two days instead of one. I’ve only been doing this a couple of weeks so far, but I really appreciate the rhythm it gives to a week.
Almost anything that you are doing on a rest day that is not your real job is restorative. Here are some proven benefits of taking a day off completely and not doing any work:
improves creativity
improves problem-solving
unblocks your mind
Why does this work? We tend to get stuck in ruts of doing things the same way. By taking restorative time away, our minds get a chance to get out of the ruts and see problems and tasks in new ways when we come back.
Faithful flexibility
Faithful flexibility is what I call my approach to my time blocks. I know what I need to do at every hour of the day, but if something comes up, I go with the flow.
What is a reasonable work-life balance
My work-life balance today is more life than work, finally! It took me 65 years to get here. For those of you who are still working, hang in there, but in your own way. Your job does not own you and it does not define you. The only one to define you is you, so schedule it out. There are 24 hours in a day. Here’s one way to allocate those precious 24 hours on a macro level:
8 hours sleep (this should be non-negotiable)
8 hours work (more about that later)
4 hours to do life things like eating, exercising, grooming, errands, laundry, you know the list; commuting is in this bucket also
4 hours to live, spend time with family and friends, do something creative, feed your mind with good books, films, TV that respects your intelligence
Hustle Culture
Now about that 8-hour work window. I realize that is easier said than done. There is a toxic hustle culture out there telling you that you need to work harder and longer than the next person to get ahead. Maybe that’s true, but maybe you and that person are racing to see who can have a heart attack first. Your life is yours. Only you can define what success is and what it isn’t. Plan your days accordingly. Maybe success means to you that when your kids are grown, they actually like you and have great memories. Success may have different meanings at different stages of your life.
There are corporate cultures that preach that an 8-hour work day is for your grandpa or other losers. Run, don’t walk, away from this job. Even if you are getting a great salary, at some point you need to wake up and realize that you are being used and abused.
Big time buckets, little time buckets
I outlined a very big-bucket list above. These buckets would need to be refined into little buckets. For example, at work, you might allocate two or three times a day to respond to emails or slack messages. This keeps your mind free to focus on actual work during other chunks of time. Many people are still thinking that they can multi-task, but the science shows that you do your best work by devoting a chunk of time to one task only, and diving deeply into it.
What do you think of the big bucket outline? Keep in mind that what is a good plan for you this year may not work next year when you get a new job or have a baby or need to take care of an elderly parent. You have to remain flexible.
