As I’m getting back into the “groove” of things, I started this pattern:

  1. Wake up. Switch to home clothes from PJs.
  2. Go to the kitchen, get some water, listen to the birds and think for a bit (about 10 mins)
  3. Exercise: stretches (mostly focusing on back and posture), with some push-ups and crunches.
  4. Meditation (5 mins) follows exercise
  5. Back to the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast
  6. Eat, take vitamins, talk to Nat as his morning starts as well
  7. Start working:
    1. View the agenda for the day (meetings, major projects, TODOs)
    2. Looking for Pinned emails from previous days and Reminders, combine them into TODOs for the day
    3. Start tackling tasks in my agenda (emacs org-mode), recording what I’m doing in notes
  8. Around 13:00 to 15:00 (depending on meetings and things), time to exercise, or if I’m in the office, go back home for this. No targeted goal specifically yet; it’s mostly about the routine, but I’m trying to include a jog here if I can, or weight lifting
  9. Back to work: this is a good “quiet time” to work on projects without interruption, depending on meetings.
  10. Around 18:00 or 19:00 finishing work. Nat’s back at that time, or I spend time with another partner, depending on the day.
  11. Around 20:00, I enjoy a show (these days it’s Silo) or video games (Helldirvers2 mostly at this point, but there’s also the excellent Mind over Magic I need to review soon)
  12. I usually sleep around 22:00 or 23:00. Hopefully I can keep up the 7 hours of sleep I get a night or so, which means I wake up around 6:00 the next day to start again.

There are many points that change in this workflow (for example, if I blog, it’s usually in the morning at some point after food, if work allows), but in general, this is the outline I try to get back to.

Once again I see the benefits of channeling all my tasks that come from emails, reminders, my calendar, phone calls, meeting etc - into my org-mode agenda, where I have one simple list without distractions of what I need to do. If it’s not there, I’m not doing it that day. And there’s always more than I can finish each day anyway, that’s just the nature of things.

The big benefit (I’ve said so many times in the past) here is that because I log what I do, I know exactly what was done and I have a good idea of what needs to be done next. This is also very useful when there’s a new project, and you can just use the template from last time. Good stuff.